 Thanks a lot. So last year, I was lucky enough to come out here and talk about the incredible transformation that takes place within the human body when we dive deep into the water, how a series of reflexes kick in and grow more pronounced the deeper we dive, how these reflexes allow us to plummet to incredible depths, to 100, 200, even 300 feet below the ocean surface. But something else happens when we get into the water. We not only go through a physical transformation, but through a sensory transformation as well. These different senses beyond the five that we already use begin to kick in. What I'm going to do today is talk about these six senses, these other reflexes and senses that occur within water. The great thing about these senses is you don't need to dive down 100, 200, or 300 feet on a single breath of air to experience them. You need only go into a float tank. So I know that most of you, actually all of you here, know what happens to the body and brain when we enter into a float tank. But I'm going to quickly review it anyway. So float tanks are very dark. So the areas in the brain that process vision, the visual cortex, become muted. They're quiet most of the time. So the auditory cortex, that process is sound, also becomes muted. You can't feel much in them, the water's warm, it's salinated. So the sensory strip in the brain becomes muted. And areas that govern movement and speech are also muted. So traditionally if you turn off one sense, another sense becomes more activated. You think about people who lose their ability to see and grow very attuned sense of hearing to compensate for that. But what happens when you turn off all of your senses? Well, floaters here, most of you know, our bodies heal faster, less active areas in the brain turn on. Sometimes we hallucinate or reach highly elucidated states. Our brains finally have time to do the stuff that can ordinarily do because they're so overloaded with sensory input. So it's in this state, this float state, that we become much more tuned in to our bodies other abilities, these extra senses. And the one that I'm going to talk about today is called magneto-reception. So scientific interest in magneto-reception started in the 50s and 60s when researchers began adhering transmitters to sharks. They were curious to see how deep they were swimming and how far they were swimming. They figured, oh, maybe they're swimming a few hundred feet back and forth again. But what they discovered was totally amazing that these animals would go down to around 2,000, sometimes 3,000 feet, and they would swim head to tail in perfect unison. And they would follow an invisible line, hundreds, even thousands of miles in the ocean, turn around and follow that same line back. Now that's a really hard thing to do when you're able to see. But when you have no ability to use your eyes, thousands of feet down, it's completely black all the time, then how do you know where you're going? So here is an interesting study that was done a little while ago, and they adhered a transmitter to a great white shark on the coast of South Africa named Nicole. And three months later, they found that Nicole swam at a depth of around 1,000 feet, swam 7,000 miles to the coast of Australia. Then she turned around and swam back. She followed a track, this is even more amazing, that was basically a straight line. So there's no landmarks there, there's not even any islands that she could have followed if she had the ability to do so. And yet she was using a sense that was more precise than modern-day GPS. So how are sharks possibly able to do this? Around that time, in the 50s and 60s, a German scientist by the name of Frederick Merkel started noticing some peculiar patterns in European robins. He noticed that in springtime, the robins around Germany would always hop north, and in fall, they would always hop south. So he did what many good scientists before him have done, he started experimenting. He placed the robins one at a time inside these little buckets that would shield the sun, the stars, and everything. And he recorded what direction they were hopping in with a touch-sensitive electrical pad, and this is what he found. In spring, they would always hop north, in fall, they would always hop south. In other words, they hopped in the exact same direction of their migration patterns, even though they had zero cues from anything else. With one exception, when he shielded the buckets with a magnetic, with a piece of metal that blocked all magnetic sense, this is what happened. The robins lost all sense of direction. So, this was in the 1960s, when Merkel theorized, he said the only way these animals could know which direction they were facing is if they were able to home in on this. This is the Earth's magnetic field, and they were able to use this as a beacon to use a sort of natural GPS to find their way around the globe. Well, of course, every scientist that heard this called it complete BS. They said, Merkel was crazy, animals don't have the sixth sense, no one paid attention to any of his experiments at all, until around 20 years later, and guess what happened? Not only have scientists found overwhelming evidence for magnetoreception in birds, but they found it in flies, and in worms, and in bacteria, and of course, in sharks. So, fish do it, flies do it, sharks do it, humans probably do it too. You probably have had an acute sense of magnetoreception for tens of thousands of years. You can think about the ancient Polynesian sailors. These guys were able to travel incredible distances in the ocean and always make it back home. So they could use the stars some of the time, they could use the sun some of the time, but what happens when a cloud layer comes up? What happens when they were blown off course by a storm? How did they always make it back home? And then, even more interesting, were these guys. This is the Goo Goo Yimether, and they were an Australian aboriginal tribe. They had no words for right and left, but they do have words for north, south, east, and west. So if one of these guys was sitting on a bench and wanted you to make room for him, he wouldn't say move over to the right, he'd say move over to the east, or move over west. They didn't bend backwards, they bent northwards or south. So the only way they could communicate with one another is if they knew their coordinates at all times, which is a really hard thing to do at night, which is almost impossible to do in an enclosed space. But they used this language for thousands of years, and they weren't alone. Dozens and dozens of cultures had this directional language. Here's another one, the Chetul of Mexico. These guys, again, didn't have words for right and left, but they do have words for north, south, east, and west. In the 90s, some researchers from Denmark took one of these guys at night time and placed him in a room and blindfolded him and spun him around 20 times and asked him to point the direction home. And he was able to do this consistently without hesitation 20 times. And I think the researchers just sort of picked up everything and left because it just didn't make sense otherwise. So in the glory days of scientific experimentation in the 70s and 80s, there were hundreds and hundreds of studies done in human magnetoreception. They would blindfold people, they'd drive them out of town, they'd spin them around in chairs, they'd put them in dark rooms for hours at a time, and consistently these people were able to point their way home. What was really interesting is that the more senses that were muted in these studies, if they were blind, if they had earplugs in, if they were placed in very calm rooms, the more heightened the sense of magnetoreception became. And the only times in which these people couldn't point their way home was when they put a small magnet on their foreheads. They lost all sense of direction. The same thing happens with birds, the same things happen with turtles. If you put a small magnet on the head of a turtle or a bird, it will either swim or fly around in circles. It's really sad, so don't do that to your pet turtle. When you go home today, leave it to the scientists to make those animals suffer. So anyway, we found out in the past couple of years there's been a renewed research into human magnetoreception. They found some scientists about four years ago found a small protein in the human eye, which is the exact protein that fruit flies use in their eyes to find their way around the planet. And it turns out that humans could unconsciously be using this protein to always know where north is, or to find their way back home. And it turns out also that humans have a small piece of magnetite in our foreheads in the exact same spot as birds and turtles. And we don't know if this is vestigial or if we're somehow using it the same way. These animals use it to locate north, south, east, and west. So I know what most of you were thinking. Most of you like me who had trouble finding this place, even though my hotel room was about three blocks away, that this is impossible. We don't have six senses. We can't possibly be able to home in on the Earth's magnetic field and find our way around the planet. But the fact of the matter is we just don't need to nowadays. But hundreds of years ago, this ability was central to our survival. This is what Manhattan was supposed to look like 400 years ago. So you'd need a really good sense of direction just to make your way home every day, especially through heavily forested areas. This is what Manhattan looks like now. So you need absolutely zero sense of direction to make your way around. There are street signs, there are landmarks, and when in doubt at any time, at any place on the planet, you can pull out your phone and know your exact coordinates at all times. So this skill of magnetoreception is probably latent, it's probably unused, but that doesn't mean it's gone away. And one of the best ways to reconnect with it and other six senses is to get in the water and float. Because when we float, we allow our brains and bodies to relax and reconnect with our more latent abilities. In many ways, floating is a key to explore our own untapped potential, whether it's healing, our physical bodies faster, triggering amphibious reflexes, or homing in on the subtle pulsing energy of the Earth's magnetic field. So thanks a lot. I appreciate it.