This writeup is academic in style, it deliberately has very little personality and is quite dry. I recommend reading the more raw version I wrote before this. It's kind of like my chain-of-thought and it adds a lot of color.

I had Gemini 3 Deep Research independently review this theory - here are it's thoroughly cited thoughts.

This is a technical breakdown of the idea that air pollution and resulting pollution-derived magnetite in the brain result in what we know as Alzheimer's disease by degrading a mechanical conscious control system over time. It's a working theory, but if you're interested in the brain, this idea will interest you.

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The working idea is that the brain has a hidden physical layer that sits between spikes and behavior:

1. Cortico–thalamo–cortical (CTC) learning loops generate structured electromagnetic (EM) fields when they synchronize (theta/gamma).
2. Biogenic magnetite nanoparticles embedded in these circuits are tuned to those fields and to Earth’s DC field. They act as a field-sensitive nanomechanical layer.
3. This layer introduces tiny, probabilistic biases in spike timing and synaptic release across many neurons.
4. At the systems level, those biases help stabilize certain global CTC trajectories and suppress others. That’s what we subjectively call conscious will / deliberate control.
5. The same physical layer is vulnerable to contamination by combustion-derived magnetite (air pollution). Wrongly sized/shaped particles inject structured noise instead of useful bias.
6. Over decades, that noise makes flexible CTC-based cognition slightly worse and more expensive than habit-based control, driving a quiet behavioral shift toward underusing the learning scaffold that later collapses as Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

So: one physical substrate (CTC fields + magnetite) both implements deliberate control and, when corrupted, sets up the specific failure pattern we call AD.

Mechanistic Sketch (Micro → Meso → Macro)

1. Two control systems

• Learning / model-based system
  • CTC loops linking hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, medial PFC, association cortex, and midline thalamus.
  • Function: episodic memory, flexible planning, credit assignment, generalization.
  • Costly but powerful
• Habit / model-free system
  • Dorsal striatum, sensorimotor cortex, cerebellum.
  • Function: cached policies, skilled action, routines.
  • Cheap and reliable

Claim: Conscious, effortful control mostly rides on the learning system. Habits run in the background unless CTC loops “grab the wheel.”

2. Fields as a global state variable

When CTC circuits synchronize (theta/gamma), the resulting current flows generate:

• A spatially structured EM field that, in principle, encodes aspects of the global CTC state (who is phase-locked to whom, which assemblies are active, etc.).
• This field is not a separate “substance”

Existing EM/ephaptic theories stop here: they say these fields might nudge nearby neurons by directly modulating membrane potential. That’s conceptually clean but physically tight on signal strength.

3. Magnetite as a field-sensitive nanointerface

Add one more ingredient:

• The brain contains biogenic magnetite nanoparticles (tens of nm).
• In Earth’s magnetic field, their magnetic energy is large enough to give them a preferred orientation, but they stay jiggly and stochastic at body temperature.
• Small AC perturbations in the local field (from CTC activity) don’t deterministically “flip” them but can slightly change the probabilities of their nanomechanical motions (rotation, torque, strain).
• If a subset of these particles is mechanically or chemically coupled to membranes, ion channels, vesicle machinery, etc., then those tiny probability shifts propagate into:
  • Slight differences in spike timing,
  • Slight differences in vesicle release probability,
  • Slight biases in plasticity thresholds.

Critically:

• No big levers. No sci-fi “magnetite memory bits.”
• Just massively parallel, tiny biases that are:
  • Globally influenced by Earth’s DC field,
  • Temporally shaped by CTC oscillations,
  • Locally tuned by neuromodulators and surface chemistry.

4. How this implements “will”

On this view:

• You don’t consciously “command” individual spikes.
• Instead, “what you’re trying to do” corresponds to a global pattern of CTC activity (driven by goals, context, dopamine, etc.).
• That pattern shapes the EM field.
• The field, via magnetite ensembles, biases the evolution of the whole CTC network in favor of some trajectories (plans, interpretations, actions) over others.
• Subjectively, this feels like you “leaning into” a choice or “holding” a decision in mind against competing tendencies.

So “will” is: A global CTC state that, through a field-sensitive magnetite layer, slightly reshapes the landscape of likely network trajectories in real time.

That’s the theoretical glue: the physical bridge from EM fields to tiny neural biases to macroscopic control.

Alzheimer’s Disease as Failure of the Same Layer

1. Bad hardware: pollution magnetite

Combustion and friction processes generate magnetite-like nanoparticles with:

• Different size distribution (often smaller, more polydisperse),
• Different shapes (spherical, fused),
• Different surface chemistry (metals, organics, oxidized shells).
• These particles enter the brain via the olfactory route and vasculature and accumulate in similar regions to biogenic magnetite.

From the control-layer perspective:

• You’ve added a large population of badly tuned particles into the same field-sensitive layer.
• They respond differently to the same fields (different relaxation times, anisotropies, coupling) and often act as strong local sources of oxidative stress.

Immediate effect is not “sudden dementia.” Instead:

• The magnetite layer becomes noisier and less coherent.
• CTC-based flexible cognition still works, but:
  • It’s a bit less precise,
  • It costs more neuromodulator/energy to get the same performance,
  • It fails slightly more often under load.

2. From micro-noise to macro-behavior

Humans are energy misers and time misers. Over years:

• Effortful, CTC-heavy cognition becomes subjectively aversive and less reliable.
• Without noticing, the person increasingly leans on:
  • Habits instead of re-planning,
  • Heuristics instead of deep deliberation,
  • Familiar patterns instead of exploration.

Net effect: chronic underuse of hippocampal–PFC–thalamic loops relative to what their environment and genetics would otherwise support.

3. Underuse → vulnerability → canonical AD

Underuse has consequences:

1. Activity-dependent support drops: Less firing → less synaptic turnover, weaker plasticity signaling, reduced local trophic support and vascular robustness.
2. Clearance and repair fall behind: Many waste clearance and repair processes (glymphatic flow, microvascular turnover, microglial housekeeping) are activity-linked. Chronically underactive regions become weakly maintained.
3. Generic pathologies express there first: Misfolded proteins, oxidative damage, microinflammation occur everywhere to some degree, but:
   • They accumulate fastest where clearance is worst,
   • They spread easiest on weakened networks.

Result: the specific CTC learning scaffold becomes the earliest and worst casualty. The clinical picture is what we call Alzheimer’s:

• Early episodic memory and navigation problems (hippocampus/entorhinal),
• Later executive and flexible control issues (mPFC, association hubs),
• Habitual and procedural behaviors relatively spared until late.

Note: in this frame, amyloid and tau are not “the cause”. They’re downstream expressions of a long-standing failure of the learning scaffold, partly driven by a corrupted magnetite control layer.

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Addendum

Assuming the core idea has merit, I'd like to refer to it as the FMHDTW (Fucking magnets, how do they work?) theory of consciousness because it would be hilarious if we called it that.

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P.S. I let AI write this one, only because I had already mostly fleshed out the idea in this earlier post. I just wanted to see if I could hammer out the details and make it a bit more scientific.

P.P.S. This article was originally titled "A Field-Sensitive Magnetite Control Layer Linking Conscious Will and Alzheimer’s Disease". That title sounded pretty boring and I wanted people to read it so I changed it.