Think about it. Isn’t light+eyes and ears+sound just the same in terms of their “influence at a distance”? We don’t feel that as abnormal or magic - simply because we’ve sensors for them and are used to it. But physically speaking light and magnetism are based on electromagnetic forces.
I think it also feels like magic because we haven’t developed much intuition about the way magnets work. If you had thousands or millions of magnetic items in your life, you would develop that intuition, which would shatter the magic. Obviously, not being able to see or feel magnetic fields plays a big role too.
For example, ropes, strings and cables are very familiar. You have a good intuitive understanding on how they work, because you’ve used them so much. There’s nothing magical about them. Imagine what it would be like if today is the first day when you learn to tie a knot. You could do completely magical things like attach two ropes together. You could even keep a box closed by tiring a rope around it. Pretty advanced stuff.
You can implant a small magnet in your fingertip and then have the ability to sense magnetic fields.
Get ready to make friends with every TSA agent you see for the rest of your life, and pray you never need an MRI.
It doesn’t even have to be a finger. There are so many underused parts of the body
Why do I feel called out by this comment
because we don’t have biological sensors for it
Honestly. The evidence for or against this is still far from certain.
New evidence for a human magnetic sense that lets your brain detect the Earth’s magnetic field
Fair point, I didn’t know about that. But even then, most of us don’t feel like we can feel it - and in the modern city living spaces it gets even less important to train such a sense.