If lightning strikes nearby, you might be in for some incredible hallucinations that resemble what is known as "ball lightning," according to a pair of scientists from the University of Innsbruck in Austria. In the lab, test subjects can experience these visions of shining spheres and lines when they undergo transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, which use huge superconducting magnets create electric fields in the brain up to 0.5 Tesla. (That's a lot; a plain-old bar magnet is only around .01 T.) According to Technology Review:
"If this happens in the lab, then why not in the real world too, say [researchers] Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl... They calculate that the rapidly changing fields associated with repeated lightning strikes are powerful enough to cause a similar phenomenon in humans within 200 metres."
So when lightning strikes nearby, it can induce fields similar to the ones created by transcranial stimulation. That ...