Your Head Doubles Your Car Remote's Range—Here's Why

It sounds like something your eccentric uncle would insist works but has no basis in reality. Yet holding your car key fob against your chin or pressing it to your temple genuinely extends its range—sometimes doubling the distance at which you can lock or unlock your vehicle.

One experimenter backed away from his car until the remote stopped working, then held it to his chin and managed to go 42 steps further—roughly 85 additional feet. Physics forums are filled with similar accounts, and the phenomenon has been confirmed through electromagnetic simulations.

Your Head Is a Surprisingly Good Antenna

The key to this trick lies in your skull's composition. The human head is approximately 73% water, and water happens to be an excellent conductor of electromagnetic signals. When you hold the key fob to your head, you're essentially turning your skull into a dielectric resonator antenna.

Here's what happens: The radio waves emitted by your key fob enter your water-dense head, where a process called dielectric resonance occurs. This phenomenon amplifies the amplitude of the electromagnetic waves, boosting the signal strength and extending the range.

Capacitive Coupling in Action

You're also creating what physicists call capacitive coupling between the fob and your head. All those fluids protecting your brain—cerebrospinal fluid, blood, and the water content of brain tissue itself—act as conductors that couple with the fob's signal and propagate it more effectively.

Think of it like this: Your fob is a tiny radio transmitter, and by touching it to your head, you've just upgraded its antenna from a small internal component to your entire skull.

Temple Placement Works Best

Not all head positions are created equal. Experiments on physics forums found that pressing the fob against your temple produces the best results, though holding it under your chin works nearly as well. The temple position likely works because it places the fob close to high concentrations of fluid-filled tissue and provides good coupling geometry.

Some people report success holding the fob beside their ear or against the back of their skull, but the temple and chin positions consistently show the most dramatic range improvements.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

This isn't just a party trick. There are practical situations where this extra range proves useful:

• Finding your car in massive parking lots or parking garages
• Checking if you locked your car from inside a building
• Remote starting your vehicle from further away on cold mornings
• Locating your car by triggering the panic alarm from a greater distance

The physics community has embraced this phenomenon as a perfect example of everyday applied electromagnetics. It demonstrates dielectric resonance, capacitive coupling, and antenna theory in a way anyone can test in seconds.

The Science Checks Out

Altair, an engineering software company, ran electromagnetic simulations specifically testing this claim. Their modeling confirmed that holding the remote close to your head increases the realized gain in the required direction, validating what experimenters had been reporting anecdotally for years.

Research on using the human body as an antenna has found that high-water-content tissues play a crucial role in signal propagation. Meanwhile, studies on implantable brain devices have extensively mapped how electromagnetic signals interact with skull bone and brain tissue—all supporting the mechanisms behind the car remote trick.

So next time you're wandering a parking lot trying to remember where you left your car, don't feel self-conscious about holding your key fob to your head. You're not being superstitious—you're applying physics.