SCIENCE Sixth sense

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true that they have played a bad role in modern Irish history" says. Note, comrades, "a bad role"!

O'Mahony is truly the master of understatement In pubs all round Belfast he would have ex-B Specials rolling in the aisles. But let us go on.

• The Protestants had privileges over the Catholies in better chances of jobs and houses amidst permaHUMANS possess many of the senses of other animals, though usually to a less developed degree, but up to now we have seemed to lack a sense of direction.

Animals often seem to be marvellously in tune with their environment, and perhaps the most impressive demonstration of this is in the ability particularly of birds to migrate hundreds or thousands of miles, often to an exact location, regardless of the absence of clues for the senses of sight or smeil. ...

Now it seems that humans also have a direction sense, as two recent findings demonstrate.

In an experiment a couple of years ago, a group of volunteers were blindfolded and driven, by a roundabout route, to an unknown destination.

They were then .. able (still blindfolded) to point fairly accurately to where they had come from.

This direction sense seemed to rely on detecting the direction of the Earth's magnetic field-= as was volunteers had magnetic 'hats' put on their heads. This completely mucked up their direction sense.

So it seems that humans (well, some at least!) can detect the Earth's magnetic field and can remember their movements in relation to it.

The animals that can also do this seem to possess special organs - deposits of magnetic, material in their heads - and it has just been shown that humans also have deposits of magnetic material in their heads; behind their So far, no nerves have been found joining the 'magnetic organ' to the brain, but it seems i ikely that they will discor 'ered eventually.

So, scientists have discovered something else new about humans _ or is it only a re-discovery? Perhaps, with the growth of civilisation and our growing control over our environment, we have merely learned to ignore this never very strong sense. Perhaps it was already declining in importance when humans Once aware of such a sense, we should be able to train and develop it. However, there is an obstacle. We have filled our environment with 'magnetic pollution?

Over the last 100 years or so we have made a vast quantity of objects out of magnetic substances such as iron, steel, nickel, etc., as well as covering the countryside with a network of current electricity (and the multitude of electric motors that run off it), all of which produce magnetic fields.