For as long as I've been doing scaptoid, particularly episodes dealing with new age beliefs

around the human body and its mystical powers, I've been getting emails from believers claiming

that the human body has an energy field.

Do we even have any idea what that's supposed to mean?

Today we're going to hear them out, learn what the claims are for a human energy field,

and see if it stands up to scientific scrutiny.

And that's today on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid, I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

Your body's energy fields.

Years after Skeptoid's original episode number one on new age energy, talk of energy fields,

particularly the human body's energy fields, continues to permeate pop culture.

A quick Google search for human energy field yields an avalanche of new age science-y sounding

results, bio fields, noetic balancing, auras, chakras, cleansing and activating your fields,

bioenergetics, science unlocking the secrets, luminosity, sensing, negative energy, positive

energy, and the human bio-electromagnetic field.

Does the human body indeed have any characteristic that can be reasonably described as an energy

field?

Although most of the usage you'll hear of the term sounds like something from Deepak Chopra,

which is clearly without any factual meaning, the idea that a living body has some measurable

effect on its immediate environment is not necessarily an unsound concept.

Our bodies generate heat, we have mass, fluids move within us, and millions of electric

signals are constantly being transmitted through our nervous system.

...