The ability to perceive Earth's magnetic field, which at one time was dismissed as a physical impossibility, is now known to exist in diverse animals. The receptors for the magnetic sense remain elusive. But it seems that at least two underlying mechanisms exist — sometimes in the same organism.
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Lohmann, K. Magnetic-field perception. Nature 464, 1140–1142 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/4641140a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4641140a
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Alex Poulsen
I can feel magnetism with my entire body. Easiest to do it with my hands as I can easily move them around to feel more localized magnetic fields such as from a computer or low power magnet. However for less localized magnetic fields such as the earth's magnetic field it is easiest to feel with my body. In blind self-tests picking a direction and rotating my body to that, I am within 10 degrees of the actual every time; south is what I feel, so if I feel the ache/pressure/pain on my back, I'm facing north.
I read once that unoxidized red blood cells are affected by a magnetic field. Logically, I assume that what I feel is simply the collective push/pull of the red blood cells on the walls of all of the arteries and veins in my body. My brain ignored this, I guess, until I stimulated this way past normal when I bought some magnet spheres, played with them for an hour, and realized my hands ached weirdly. After using them a couple times, I realized that it was the magnetic field. After a few weeks I had basically trained my brain to not only not ignore this signal, but also represent it as another sense (to add to the ~26 science says we all should have). Likely the increased blood vessel density from capillaries caused this to feel like a feeling in my skin or just under it. I still am not fully sure why I can feel the direction, maybe pressure sensing nerves can sense pressure both towards and away from the skin and my brain can interpret this and pick one as more important. This also explains why I feel it largely on both the close and far side of my hand, for example. Somehow I can also force my brain to pick out signals in a particular direction, like forcing my brain to consider the opposite side as the side with the most feeling, or try to feel a direction with less strength to temporarily lessen the feeling when my body starts to hurt from being in the same orientation for too long. Also I can differentiate between multiple magnets with more than around 40 degrees of separation an alternate between which I'm primarily feeling, again my brain gets the signals but is able to modify it before I feel it.
send an email to alex@alexpoulsen.me if you'd like to contact me