Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things A Fish, a weekly broadcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covenant Garden. My name's Anna, I'm here today with Andy,

James and fellow QIL Alice Campbell Davies, and once again we've gathered around the mics with our

four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go, starting with you, Alice.

So my fact is humans should be able to sense magnetic fields, should be, should be. So there's been a little bit of

research into this, not that much actually, but we have Cryptochrome in our retinal cells, which is

responsible for pigeons, migration and that kind of thing. And we also have magnetite in our brains,

which is a magnetic nanoparticle which helps direct other animals like bacteria. So why the

disappointing lack, why can't I say where I live from here? Well Andy, can you point south from here?

Yes I can actually, but only because you know where the river is. I know where the river is.

Well they have actually done some studies on this, there's a really controversial study from the

1980s done by a guy called Robin Baker, where he took a bunch of students out on a minibus, drove them on a

really securitous route all around Manchester, and then blindfolded them and told them to point to home.

A bunch of them that didn't have magnets strapped to their heads could point home and a bunch of them with

magnets strapped to their heads couldn't, which suggests that magnetic fields were interrupting their

ability to point home with. But then no one else has managed to replicate the study.

No, in fact it's been disproven multiple times. But he has replicated the study so in a sense.

Maybe all of these people lived in that massive tower on Deansgate in Manchester,

which you can see from pretty much the whole city. I think they were blindfolded on the journey, weren't they?

Yeah, I'm not sure if they were blindfolded on the way home. That might have...

It takes it too far. It's an amazing beginning for a horror story though,

where you have to put on a blindfold and get on the professor's bus, and then it goes away,

...