Ball lightning actually electromagnetic overload of the brain?

Ball lightning is a rare atmospheric electrical phenomenon resulting in weird orbs of light that seem to float in the air for much longer than a regular lightning bolt. Scientists have very little data about it or insight into how it's caused, and some even question whether it exists at all. As previously mentioned on BB, a recent study by University of Innsbruck researchers suggests that as many as half of reported cases are actually hallucinations caused by regular lightning overloading the brain with magnetic fields. In their research, Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl used a transcranial magnetic stimulator to blast the brain's visual cortex. From National Geographic:

Focusing magnetic fields on the visual cortex of the brain caused the subjects to see luminous discs and lines. When the focus was moved around within the visual cortex, the subjects reported seeing the lights move...

The researchers make a convincing argument that some ball lightning reports are spurred by hallucinations, said John Abrahamson, a chemist and ball lightning expert at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who was not involved in the study.

But "I cannot believe that most of the images reported as ball lightning are due to this brain influence," Abrahamson said in an email.

For one thing, the colors of light seen by the subjects in the experiment were "white, gray, or in unsaturated colors." But ball lightning has been reported in a variety of colors, including orange, green, and blue, Abrahamson said.

"Ball Lightning May Be All in Your Head"

• [bobhughes]

  link failure… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene
  and grammar failure, obviously it should read “being” instead of “will be”

• [Anonymous]

  I go to UC. This guy is cool :)

• [liar]

  While on vacation near Monitor Pass, California, 1970 (+ or – a year), late August/ early September, I remember sitting with my family and looking down into the large valley below and watching what appeared to be golden, blue, green and white Billiard balls moving around as if they were water drops in a skillet, for about 15 mins. Variable speed of progress, and completely silent. eerie. 6 people all saw. They (the balls, not the people) disappeared like soap bubbles.

• [Anonymous]

  His brain’s overloading
  It has a chocolate coating

• [Anonymous]

  I saw it twice. Both times in a house. One I saw alone, the other with my friend.

  The first time I saw it alone I noticed light coming out of a room. I walked down the hallway and was going to turn the light off. But no light way on. It was hovering then just fizzle out. It was blue. Saw it only for about 2 seconds.

  The second time it happened it lasted only seconds as well. It was bright blue bordering whitish. It very brightly illuminate the entire room. More so than the actual lights in the room, like someone took a flood light to the room, which is what my friend thought it was.

  It too just hovered and fizzled out.

  Does it exist?

  Damn right it does. I saw it twice and it wasn’t my brain on drugs, or some sort of psychosis of the eyeballs.

• [Anonymous]

  On an July weekend, back in the late 80′s, my brother, my future wife, and I went camping in the Dragoon Mountains in Southeastern Arizona. We woke early and took a hike up a side canyon that I had been in before on a high school geology field trip. Being there without 80 fellow students was going to be nice. It’s a cool little canyon with a spring, a small stream, some mineral deposits, and is filled with granite boulders creating an amazing array of hidden nooks some with well used metates (depressions used to grind corn and nuts) in their floors.

  We had to start early and get out of the bottom of the canyon before the daytime heating would spawn that days monsoon storms. We didn’t make it in time. It was just too much fun watching the tadpoles, having hawks take exception to our presence, looking at minerals, sunspots through a welders lens (my brother was majoring in astronomy), and appreciating the rare (most others have been mined) small silver vein that is soft enough that your fingernail leaves an impression. All very cool and hard to leave.

  — That silver vein: assays out at 83%!! with the balance being mostly lead. Go a foot over and you get less than .0001%. We did it twice and that is what it came back as. But it is only the width of a dime so you would have to move a lot of rock to get to it. Thank goodness; it’s nice to see a miniature version of much bigger ones that various lucky prospectors discovered years ago. —

  A big noisy storm built quickly, a cool moist wind started down the canyon that was going to turn into a wet one fairly soon, so we took shelter in one of the larger nooks with several metates in the floor. Proof that others had been there long before. While waiting out the storm, my future wife Cathy found the big bag of unpoped popcorn that we couldn’t find the previous evening (how/when did it get in the backpack?) So we decided to try out one of the metates. A suitable rock was found, a couple of hand fulls of popcorn was put in the bottom of the metate, and Cathy was to try out the old kitchen tool first. Just as she was making good headway into the production of popcorn corn meal the first big bolt of lightning hit close by. And that’s when the first of many appeared.

  A ball of lighting floated through the air. It scared the hell out of us. But going out of shelter wasn’t an option as the amount of lighting had grown to an intense level outside our shelter. So many balls of lightning appeared over the next hour that we lost count (32+). Some of the balls went out with an incredible bang (about as loud as .30 carbine) but most disappeared in a muted pop somewhere in the small cave. When the fifth ball appeared, my brother threw a popcorn kernel at it. This was the first of many objects.

  So what did we find out about them by heaving available objects at them –

  Water/Spit: You can do it, I just don’t recommend it. Most of the time its fine and just absorbed by the ball but sometimes a very small spike of ..energy? would come out of it toward who ever squirted it. Rather unnerving.

  Pebbles and Sand: Small pebbles will just go through it or make the ball disappear. They don’t seem to heat up or anything, although we think that we had one stone change course a bit. Sand however can be spit out at strange angles.

  A Dime: Shorts the ball out for the most part. Mostly with a loud pop. And can fling the dime a few feet and causes shallow pitting in the silver faces. Whether by the ball or the flinging, who knows..

  Foxtail grass stock: We only had one that didn’t fall short and it singed it pretty good.

  Popcorn: The balls ate them. Not even cinders left.

  The storm moved off a bit and the ball lighting stopped. It had been about 90 minutes since we first entered the boulder created cave.

  …The interesting thing was looking at them through the welders glass. For the most part there wasn’t much to see as the air at their surface glows brightly and is hard to see through. But some didn’t or had clear areas as if the clouds parted and on these you could lots of detail. The surface looks like a Cat’s Paw knot. There is energy flowing in defined bands in distinct hemispheres going in opposite directions like a miniature Saturn. The orbs pulse as if the energy within them isn’t evenly distributed or a wave of current is moving through it. There is lighter and relatively darker areas on the surface not unlike an interference pattern. Very strange.

  It was one of the greatest days ever…

• [Anonymous]

  Ball lightning, while rare, is absolutely real.

• [Anonymous]

  I thought ball lightning was a plasma caused by vaporized material and a strong electromagnetic field during a lightning strike?
  You can make it at home in your microwave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9Q070Ol6jc

• [Anonymous]

  My mother passed away April 30 of this year. On the evening of July 8 between 12:30 to 1:00am I was unable to sleep so I layed in family room recliner. All other family members were asleep. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a perfectly formed white ball of light make its way across the ceiling towards me and ending in a skylight where it stayed till I put the light on. Upon doing that the light disappeared. I believe it was the spirit of my mother letting me know she was ok. As she was dying my sister and I had asked her to give us a sign that she was ok on the other side. There is no way I was dreaming and there was no explanation for the light i.e., car lights, street lights (have none) house lights etc. I know that room very well at night and this ball of light was unlike anything i have ever seen.

• [pidg]

  To add to the “my grandmother” stories…

  My grandmother (and several other people) once watched a ball of lightning enter through a (closed) window, move slowly across the room, and exit through another window.

  I’ve seen what looked very much like ball lightning ‘travelling’ along high-voltage cables several miles away at night.

• [Anonymous]

  Ball lightning is a very real, natural atmospheric plasma phenomenon. There are photos, film, video, and magnetic sensor recordings of this phenomenon, and there have been many peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, conferences, and various plasma physicists analyses, etc., etc.

  I would venture that the many examples of genuine ball lightning far exceed examples of strong magnetic field-induced hallucinations in the visual cortex, as this article linked to the NatGeo article would suggest or imply. In any event, it is a relatively rare natural event, most often tied to weather-related lightning storms, although there are other atmospheric conditions which can give rise to actual ball lightning, as I have found in my extensive research and investigation of this phenomenon over many years.

  One question which the NatGeo article raises, and I will read to see if it is delineated, is just how do natural, intense magnetic force lines occur, vary, or get initiated to create these kinds of magnetically induced hallucinations of either balls or disks of light within the susceptible visual cortex involved, and what is the mechanism that triggers these shapes and/or related colors and apparent movements within or overlaid on the visual field when encountering such strong, natural magnetic flux lines of force as to create this hallucinatory effect.

  I posted over on the linked, prior article featured on boingboing, that of transcranial magnetic stimulation [TMS] being used in laboratory settings to induce similar kinds of hallucinations, but the NatGeo article I assume discusses a different kind of naturally occurring phenomenon.

  Here’s an excerpt from what I posted on the comment thread (near bottom of that thread)of the earlier TMS related article:

  ————————————————–

  “Explained: Ball lightning, fairies, aliens, glitches in the matrix” and “Ball lightning is in your mind’s eye”; as a consequence of transcranial magnetic stimulation?

  Well, not hardly. If you do research on atmospheric plasma phenomena, including ball lightning (see, for example, http://bit.ly/aF0OKo), you’ll find many cases where still photos, film, and video has captured it on magnetic or photographic media, not as a result of hallucinatory mental processes, although I’d guess TMS accounts for some visual cortex induced hallucinations of a similar appearance.

  I’ve seen actual ball lightning twice, once rapidly floating between clouds during a thunderstorm with lots of cloud elevation sheet lightning, and once after nearly being struck (4 or 5 feet away) by a tributory lightning bolt (the balls actually looked like briefly apparent floating crescents).

  My father, a career US Air Force NCO flight engineer, once observed a small sphere of light (about 3 to 5 inches in diameter) float slightly bouncing down the aisle of his EC-121 Lockheed Constellation, and reached out to touch it before being restrained by another airman, who said it might burn or electrocute him. It disappeared out the back of the aircraft with a loud pop. After landing, the airplane was inspected, and found to have a perfectly round 1 to 2 inch hole burned through the aluminum skin of the plane, near the tail.

  So, while there may theoretically be some cases of what appears to otherwise be “ball lightning” in some cases involving direct TMS, which you would think requires laboratory conditions to induce, the reality is that most if not all ball lightning incidents are based on a real natural atmospheric plasma phenomena. There’s lots of research and theoretical and evidence-based peer-reviewed scientific literature extant for decades on this actual, genuine anomalous phenomena, particularly from Europe, Japan, and Russia.

  The physics and actual nature of the phenomena is uncertain, and varies, but there is no doubt most such observations involve external, real atmospheric or tectonic (fault zones, piezo-electric, etc.) phenomena.

  These “balls of light” are also called “earth lights” or spook lights, such as appear in an area near Marfa, Texas. Read some literature by Dr. Michael Persinger, ref. his TMS Koren or “god” helmet and the contrasting perspectives and analyses by Paul Devereux (see wiki for both). That’s a beginning point.

  Then there was the time in late July of 1972, during a camping trip in NorCal in a remote national forest, where I observed, during perfectly clear warm weather, a meteor-like streak across the sky of a yellowish/goldish, slightly orangey object silently zip across my plane of vision. Three or four minutes later, it zipped back to streak across the sky much lower and brighter in nearly the opposite direction. It moved so fast I could not see an object, per se—only a very fast moving streak of light, similar to the color of metal heated in a blacksmith’s kiln, with a denser orangey color on the periphery with a lighter color in the middle.

  After that, my brother glimpsed it approach at tree-top level, then it suddenly backed up and down out of my brother’s line of peripheral vision, and then, in another 3 or 4 minutes, it appeared directly overhead, from the _opposite_ side of the small clearing we were camping in to cross to the other side of the clearing, about 50 to 60 feet above us, moving slowly in a kind of “)” or curved “C” movement directly over the clearing we had camped, and which appeared much less bright, somewhat like a flourescent bulb, spherical, with a defined circular edge, silent, and about 18 to 22 feet in diameter, before passing out of our line of sight over the tree line.

  Now, I always assumed that this was probably some very rare natural phenomena, such as ball lightning or some kind of long-lasting atmospheric plasma, but subsequent extensive research and a conversation in 1982 with Jacques Vallee indicated that, since ball lightning does not normally last that long, have that much variation in speed of movement (from extraordinarily fast at elevation to relatively slow at nearest point of approach), variable brightness related to speed or proximity, extreme back and forth directionality or “falling leaf” pattern, nor apparent or coincidental reactivity to being initially perceived by my brother, where the object moved back and away after he turned his head to look at it, that this phenomena would seem to fall into some other category altogether and is the very definition of an unidentified flying object of some type, or “UFO.” Note I said “unidentified,” not the stereotypical “alien spacecraft”—I don’t know the origin or nature of what my brother and I observed.

  There were a relatively large number of sightings, often from forest lookout towers, in this general area and timeframe, including a series of observations at Happy Camp, CA, and Yakima Indian Reservation further north in Washington state, and these sightings included both metallic archetypal disk shapes and luminous balls of light. This has been thoroughly documented. See
  http://www.vogelstudy.org/archives.htm and http://bit.ly/ckwxff (pages 3 through 7, MUFON Journal, June 2003) for reference, among a wide variety of other internet sources. Don’t take my word for it—do the googley research for yourself.

  Make of that what you will, but I know what I saw.

  I doubt very much my “transcranial” frontal lobes or visual cortex were being magnetically stimulated during the incident described above, nor was I on any intoxicants. It actually happened. 8^}

• [Anonymous]

  I guess your earlier HOWTO post on making ball lightning can be condensed to one step:

  “1. Jam your head inside an electromagnet.”

• [Rev. Benjamin]

  I really like that illustration. I imagine a Japanese anime character shooting it in from space.

• [Eric Hunting]

  One of my all-time favorite books as a kid was A Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomenon by William Corliss. (http://www.librarything.com/work/198723) I was particularly intrigued by the ball lightning accounts and always wanted to see it myself. I recall a Skunkworks story decades ago that claimed to have re-created ball lightening in a lab setting through the explosive discharge of a set of submarine batteries. In the 80s, if memory serves, a Japanese inventor claimed to have created a ball lightening generator -basically a table-top device that created and trapped a ball of plasma in a kind of electrostatic mesh cage. He could supposedly reproduce a variety of reported ball lightning phenomenon with this machine.

  One of the most intriguing phenomenon noted in the Corliss book was sea lights; vast luminous and moving patterns of light shining from underwater as if generated by gigantic undersea projectors. They often took the forms of rotating pinwheels and spirals supposedly many miles across. Reports of these from sailors seemed to subside by WWII and I’ve often wondered if these are still seen today and, if not, what happened to them given how numerous they once were.

• [MollyMaguire]

  My grandma used to tell tales of the ball lightning she saw in Nebraska. Said one time a ball floated over to the dog, touched it on the nose, and the dog dropped dead. One of the reasons she moved to Washington state.

• [TimDrew]

  Goodness Gracious!

• [protogenes]

  The story is nonsense. I’ve seen the real thing and it was no hallucination.

• [Anonymous]

  Seeing as how you can find a metric ton load of videos of ball lightning all over the net, I am gonna say no. It’s not all in your brain.

• [Anonymous]

  Apparently all the commenters on here have experienced hallucinations. Please leave your computer and proceed to the nearest hospital.

• [Anonymous]

  While some reports of ball lightning might be electromagnetic-triggered hallucinations, there are quite a few reports that are clearly not just brain phenomenon because they were caught on video or on still photos.

  A quick web search turns up all sorts of pics and videos.

• [C White]

  As seen on the cover of the Tintin adventure “The Seven Crystal Balls” also!

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Crystal_Balls

• [VICTOR JIMENEZ]

  Holly Unicorn!
  I do see points and lines of light in my peripheral vision (once in just in front of me) when i´m working with my computer for long hours in the heart of the night(01:30-03:30 AM).

  I own a pretty shitty computer that makes an shitload of noise due to all their fans working to lift it and take off to somewhere where I cant punish it.

  I never thought of electromagnetism, and as long I know my computer isn’t a Transcanial Magnetic Stimulator (cool name).

  Any suggestions?

  • [Anonymous]

    This maybe scaremongering, but I think if you are seeing white flashes of lights, you should go to an eye doctor and also get your blood pressure checked. I started noticing white flashes and streaks in my vision and after mild internet research found this could be related to high blood pressure, and sure enough I did have high blood pressure. I’ve gotten it down now through exercise and removing stressors, but I still occasionally see these spots. They have always been the worse when I stay up late and pull allnighters, which I think raises blood pressure (I’m not at all a doctor or knowledgeable about these things). The eye doctor said my retinas weren’t damaged.

  • [Snig]

    you can have episodes where you see the aura from a migraine, without having the migraine headache. Called a silent migraine. If you do experience splitting headache after the lights, then it’s just migraine with aura. Look at google images for migraine aura, see if you recognize anything. If that’s not it, maybe it’s a zither.

    • [VICTOR JIMENEZ]

      It looks totally like a aura migraine! Thanks you very much Snig!

      Now my next problem is solving how to get my computer not to perform a vuvuzela sonata each time i turn it on.

• [WalterBillington]

  It’s real, fo’ sure. I saw one while working in a gathering thunderstorm felling tree branches (I didn’t say I was smart).

  Lightning struck a house 100 yards away, and a ball 4 or 5 feet of bright white light stayed relatively tethered to whatever it hit, floated a bit, then exploded in a shower of sparks.

  So cool.

  My brother saw exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time. We ran indoors. No hallucinating!

  I figured it hit the tv antenna, burned out the wire instantly, and the energy was stuck in situ until it dissipated in spectacular manner.

• [Matt Staggs]

  Obviously some sort of Lovecraftian menace from beyond space and time. Obviously.

• [Atvaark]

  My grand-grandma witnessed ball lightning and one detail of the story makes me believe it was a real, atmospheric electrical phenomenon: she said the ball came out of the TV set when lightning stroke the antenna. Then, it advanced slowly through the room and got attracted by the coal oven made of massive steel. The ball disappeared when it touched the oven.

  That sounds very much like an electric charge that gets attracted by the ground. A massive steel oven makes an awesome mass.

• [steelball]

  There is an episode of the Arthur C. Clarke show where he short circuits an old Navy submarine battery in the hopes of creating ball lightning. In the explosion there is what appears to be a plasma ball that casts a shadow and bounces off the floor. The results were inconclusive though.

• [Anonymous]

  I saw something similar to ball lightning when a high power line was down over the roadway. It was Arizona, extremely dry and dusty/windy. We were in a truck and there were emergency crews working on it and slowing traffic greatly. As we crossed over the area where the lines were down me and my 2 passengers witnessed a massive blue ball of light that lasted about 2 seconds. It was about 30 feet up and appeared the size of an average living room. We also experienced a slight shock from having our arms on the door frames. Just my 2 cents

• [Anonymous]

  Ball lightning not real? Bah!
  On a very electric night years ago I was on a plane landing at Logan that was struck by lightning. Hours later at my home in Westport Ma. the storm crashed around my house. Three times, when our wood stove’s metal chimney was struck, ball lightning was released inside the house. From the kitchen both my wife and I watched the white, basketball size orbs float like bobbing bubbles. We could see these both upstairs and down. They were seeking a way out! They slowly moved until they located smoke detectors on the ceilings at which point they vanished, sucked through the wiring and into the ground. It is very real baby!

• [slugabed]

  So how is it possible that multiple people see ball lightning at the same time? Are they all under these effects in the same way at the same time?

  If that is the case, maybe through careful control of the magnetic forces the hallucinations could be shaped into more useful shapes rather than balls and disks. Maybe this could be the new entertainment medium.

  Will I eventually see Avatar 3 presented full Magnetic Hallucination format in a theatre near me?

• [websorcerer]

  On an AlItalia flight from Hamburg to Milan, we flew through a storm. I was seated on the aisle over the wing. Suddenly there was a ball of yellow-white light in the aisle just outside the door to the cockpit. It moved slightly back and forth for about 10 seconds and then disappeared with a loud BANG.

  The captain came on the intercom and told us not to be worried, that there was no danger. No further explanation was forthcoming.

  I assumed it was ball lightning and not a hallucination since everyone in the plane saw/heard it.

• [bobhughes]

  Phosphenes, and their relationship to strong electric or magnetic fields through the brain is nothing new.

  I find it extremely hard to believe that several people in a room will experience the same “hallucination” given the tiny likelihood of the field strength & direction will be similar enough through each person’s brain to cause the same visual phenomena, in the same perceived location.

• [Anonymous]

  While on vacation near Monitor Pass, California, 1970 (+ or – a year), late August/ early September, I remember sitting with my family and looking down into the large valley below and watching what appeared to be golden, blue, green and white Billiard balls moving around as if they were water drops in a skillet, for about 15 mins. Variable speed of progress, and completely silent. eerie. 6 people all saw. They (the balls, not the people) disappeared like soap bubbles.

• [dbarak]

  Interesting, that’s very close to my college fraternity nickname – Balls of Lightning.