Low-intensity magnetic fields alter operant behavior in rats
โ Scribed by John R. Thomas; John Schrot; Abraham R. Liboff
- Book ID
- 102758847
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1986
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 769 KB
- Volume
- 7
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0197-8462
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
โฆ Synopsis
The present study demonstrates that operant behavior is affected by a combination of a 60-Hz magnetic field and a magnetostatic field 2.6 X 10-5T (about half the geomagnetic field). Rats exposed to this combination for 30 min consistently exhibited changes in the rate and pattern of responding during the differential reinforcement of low rate (DRL) component of a multiple fixed ratio (FR) DRL reinforcement schedule. By contrast, there were no measurable changes following exposure to the static field alone or to the oscillating field alone, even with a 10-fold increase in intensity (5 X W 5 to 5 x Tms). A cyclotron resonance mechanism has been suggested as a possible explanation for the observation that weak static magnetic fields modify the response of in vitro brain tissue to low-frequency magnetic fields. The choice of static field intensity B, and frequency v in the present study follows from the cyclotron resonance condition Y = (1/2?r)(q/m)B,, for singly charged lithium, an element in extensive use in the clinical treatment of affective disorders in humans. The present research is consistent with a cellular cyclotron resonance mechanism and tends to imply a functional dependence of behavior on the geomagnetic field.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
Forty male rats of the Wistar ST strain were trained and observed for Sidman avoidance (SA) for 7 weeks or for discriminative avoidance (DA) for 14 weeks to determine the effects of exposure to a strong static-magnetic field. Before avoidance conditioning was completed, rats in the SA group were exp
## Smith et al. [ 19941 concluded that their experiment demonstrated that rats could detect, or were sensitive to, magnetic fields over five frequency-flux density pairs ranging from 1900 pT at 7 Hz to 200 pT at 65.1 Hz. The absence of exposure to sham-field conditions precludes such a conclusion.