A person's body is composed of energy fields that interact with the world around them. Imagine being able to sense the energy that surr...
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| A person's body is composed of energy fields that interact with the world around them. |
We’re bits of matter and lots of water held together by vast fields of energy. If we didn’t have electromagnetic (EM) energy in our bodies, we would disintegrate. EM energy binds the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that comprise the 60 percent of our bodies made up of water, acting as a sort of invisible glue. But EM also extends far beyond us. The entire planet is part of that system.
Some scientists believe this expansive network helps us tune into the world around us. For instance, it might be the reason you just “ click ” with someone upon first meeting them. Rather than establishing a brand-new theory of consciousness, anesthesiologist Marco Cavaglià, MD, PhD, and research fellow Tommaso Firaux—along with their collaborators at the Polytechnic University in Turin, Italy—are building a bridge between established findings across membrane biophysics, neuroscience , and electromagnetism.
The scientists say our interaction with these EM fields works a little like an antenna. Most energy waves are invisible. Even though we can’t see them, they affect us. It’s like if you put a radio in an empty room, you won’t see any sound waves there. When you turn the radio on, you may hear music come out of it. The musicians aren’t in the radio. They’re not in the room. The radio is picking up signals sent from far away. The sound the radio makes is defined by the frequency it’s tuned to.
If you have more than one radio and those radios are tuned to different frequencies, the sound waves will cancel each other out, to some extent. You’ll hear bits and pieces, but it will be a cacophony. If they’re all tuned to the same frequency and station, though, the signal is amplified. A single song can amplify and fill the room. Within the boundaries of biology, humans can also tune in to different frequencies or to the same one.
If two people’s energy waves match in amplitude and frequency, they’ll line up perfectly, rising and falling together, and that makes the signal they’re producing grow. That’s called resonance. But if two waves have different frequencies, they may cancel each other out—like a singer on one radio station making it hard to hear the music coming from the other station. That’s dissonance. The energy humans tap into and produce may be resonant or dissonant. “So, that’s why we can either resonate or hate each other at the first sight,” Cavaglià says. “It depends on the field we are expressing.”
This could explain a social science concept called collective resonance, in which strangers at a concert, sporting event, or even funeral wind up on what seems to be a shared wavelength.
So we can think of the brain as constantly interacting with rhythms—internal and external—and the outcome depends on whether the system falls into stable, coherent patterns or unstable, noisy ones.
At such events, Firaux says, “[attendees] are all exposed to the same structured inputs: music, chanting, synchronized movement, shared emotion, focused attention. Those elements are not just symbolic, they are rhythmic and physiological. They can influence breathing, heart rate, neural oscillations, and emotional tone. When many individuals are immersed in the same rhythm and emotional direction, their internal dynamics can begin to align.”
In neuroscience, he says, forms of “inter-brain synchronization” have been observed using techniques like hyperscanning, where brain activity across individuals is more synchronized during shared experiences. From the perspective of the team’s research, collective resonance may reflect a temporary alignment of energy-information patterns across multiple brains and bodies. In that sense, collective resonance could be understood as a shared attractor state, emerging across individuals exposed to the same structured environment.
However, a big difference between a radio and a person is that the radio isn’t shaped by what it’s playing. The transmissions don’t help the radio understand it exists. But humans are different. This, the scientists say, is because of what we do with the inputs we get from this field of energy.
“Once you have memory, language, and self-monitoring, the brain starts building a ‘semantic story,’ a coherent explanation of what’s happening and who ‘I’ am,” Firaux says. “So we can think of the brain as constantly interacting with rhythms—internal and external—and the outcome depends on whether the system falls into stable, coherent patterns or unstable, noisy ones.”
In other words, as much as you may feel ubiquitously yourself, there may have been an invisible force silently shaping you all along. Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She's covered ocean wave energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery; healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.
