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JF: How does this system of positive ions in bioelectricity differ from common electricity?

SA: The difference between the electricity that we get from the wall plug and the electricity that makes us able to feel and sense and think in our environment and understand the world around us is the nervous system’s electricity, which is one aspect of bioelectricity.

Wall plug electricity is carried by electrons – negatively charged particles that are arrayed in a wire. Our bioelectricity, what makes our nervous system work, is carried by positively and negatively charged ions, like potassium and sodium and calcium. These are distributed quite evenly in our extracellular fluid – this is what makes  you "two-thirds water". This extracellular fluid is saturated with these ions but cells have very specific preferences about which ions they want in them and which ones they want out of them.

So for example, nerve cells – they really prefer potassium in their resting state. They don’t like sodium, so their membranes are a sort of decision-making apparatus. They are studded with tens of thousands of these little pores called ion channels. The channels are not just passive, like in a sieve – they are smart pores and they can decide what gets in and what stays out to a really amazing precision. And there’s all types of different ion channels.

The ones in nerve cells swap potassium for sodium – they always like to keep the sodium out and the potassium in. They are pretty strict about that, like bouncers at a nightclub. And as a consequence of all this sorting with the potassium inside and the sodium outside, the electrical charges accumulate in a way that makes the inside of the cell have a negative voltage compared with the outside of the cell.

Your -70 millivolts feels like a very small amount when you’re looking at the world around you, at your scale, but at the scale of this membrane, it’s absolutely enormous. It’s like having a lightning bolt passing between your two outstretched arms. This is the resting potential, this state of tension is the neuron's  happy place. When an action potential comes in, it basically forces all the gates open, which means that sodium rushes in, potassium rushes out and everything drops to zero. It depolarises for a moment, and this oscillating ability to swing between lightning and zero is what makes a cell "excitable". That's what sends the action potentials.

These little zaps are your nervous system's signal that tells you something has happened – for example, if you touch a hot stove or if you see a red dress. Every single aspect of your life is controlled by these little signals . Now that’s bioelectricity and that’s the chassis for your entire nervous system. This is the main context in which we have  studied bioelectricity, because I think we are obsessed with our own sensorium, perception, action, and intelligence. And we’ve gotten quite bamboozled by it in a way, or we’ve just had our head turned. We’ve really ignored the way that bioelectricity governs the rest of the body.

JF - It’s interesting that we go to sensory perception, rather than the more existential fields, like the fundamentals of creation - what is the electrome role in embryonic development?

SA: Mike Levin, who is leading the way in bioelectricity right now says that the nervous system didn’t invent bioelectric signalling, it basically piggybacked on a much older system. And that chassis is something that we’ve been using since we were single-celled organisms.

That’s where developmental bioelectricity comes into play, because it starts from the moment that you’re an egg or a sperm – the egg and the sperm, they’re both electrogenic cells, which means cells that produce electrical activity. When they meet, there’s this incredible electrical event. The activation switch basically turns on the egg and gets it ready to start. Dividing and doing the whole development thing.

And in fact, if you don’t put a sperm or its genome in the egg, but you do zap it electrically in a way that mimics the activation switch, it will continue to develop. I mean, it’s unethical to see how long this process would go on in humans, but when they did it to a rabbit egg, it went one-third of the way through pregnancy. Almost immaculate conception.

There’s something really profound that happens electrically without which you can’t have the creation of life, which is pretty interesting too.  After the sperm has hit the egg, there’s this massive calcium wave that surrounds the egg, like a tsunami.

And the biologist who discovered why this happens, Laurinda Jaffe, is actually the daughter of one of the first people who looked into bioelectricity in the ’60s in a really rigorous way. In the 70s, she found a very interesting use case for this calcium wave, in some creatures that don’t have wombs, but that are sexually reproducing creatures, like  brown algae, where you have the eggs and the sperm all co-mingling in the water – instead of implanting into a womb.

The calcium wave  creates  something that is almost like an electric fence that goes up to prevent any other sperm from coming in, because there would be huge chromosomal abnormalities if more than one sperm were to fertilise the same egg. So this is the seaweed’s way of setting up a fast barrier so nothing else can come in. It happens more slowly in human and mammalian eggs when there’s a womb, because you don’t have quite as much volume of sperm.

Once the egg has become a blastocyst,  no difference between the outside and the inside electrically – there’s no voltage. However, as the fertilised egg begins to differentiate and multiply and develop into the organism, and the cells assume whatever identity that they’re going to have – nerve cells, bone cells, muscle cells, fat cells – their electrical identity actually ramps up in tandem with whatever job they’re going to have in your body. We’re not there yet to say it’s directly causative. But nobody knows why else cells' electrical identity changes perfectly in line with their expression into a different type of tissue.

So those nerve cells I was talking about, those are –70; musculoskeletal tissue is going to be much more robust at 90 – a more intense voltage. Fat cells are about 50. Liver cells end up being about -40 – almost like a Paint by Numbers for embryology.

At first, people just figured this is an epiphenomenon – like an accidental byproduct of whatever much more relevant chemical processes are going on. Then Mike Levin and Dany Adams did some experiments in the 2000s and 2010s, showing that when developing tadpoles, for example, couldn’t change their cellular electrical identities properly, this led to pretty intense birth defects.

Adam Cohen at Harvard showed that when those cells power up like little batteries to assume their electrical and physical identities, it’s not like they go from zero, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 – they just go straight from their destination, zero to 60 say.. Almost like a state change, like water turning to ice.

This is also important because what they’ve been able to understand from these experiments – including where they change the electrical dimensions of some particular cell where they were able to grow eyes on parts of frogs that don’t normally grow eyes, like the gut or the butt – is that just by changing the electrical identity of those cells, you start to understand that these cells communicate with each other  outside of the realm of the nervous system. Bioelectricity is not just for telling the body what's happening in the environment around it - it is also the system that the body uses to govern its 40 trillion cells.

When those little cells that are happily doing their jobs in your body as skin cells or bone cells or whatever, when they decide they’re going to jump ship and go rogue, just eat  and  multiply like crazy, they stop paying  attention to what the body needs from them and just take over. And that's cancer. And  interestingly  when they shrug off their physical jobs in the body, the cells' electrical identities are also lost - they depolarise to zero.

Levin and other people have done experiments to prevent that from happening. So for example, they had tadpoles that had been engineered to express tumours, and they had already begun to express these tumours. Using a yeast gene or something, they  prevented the cells fromt depolarising. This alone prevented the formation of tumours. They even managed to actually coax existing tumour cells back into healthy cells.

In principle, it’s really interesting that you’ve got this society of cells that is held together with this sort of bioelectric glue. There is research that suggests that electrical approaches to cancer with ion channel blockers could work, but it is very early days, and, as somebody once cautioned me, ‘we’ve cured cancer two billion times in a Petri dish’. This is tadpoles – this isn’t in humans, this is something that hasn’t been translatedinto humans yet.

JF: This voltage signature, is it consistent depending on the organ or function and universal to everyone? Could it be an indicator for imbalance, the measure of a drop in voltage as a sign of stress in the body, pre-disease stage? 

SA: Absolutely. And they’re starting to figure it out –  the electrical activity of all of our neurons in our brain creates these waves.

In terms of full-body voltages, the only person I know who studied this was Harold Saxon Burr who in the 40s or 50s, tried to measure his employees’ overall voltages. His experiments deduced that men had different voltages based on their state that day, with small fluctuations. From that he concluded that you could actually use a person’s voltage readings to figure out whether they were having an off day or they weren’t quite there, so he suggested this was electrical rather than physiological. The suggestion was to use this method, for example, to figure out if a fighter pilot should be trusted to fly a plane that day.

The science on that is outdated and there are no modern day equivalents that I know of, but the reason I put it in the book is because of the intriguing connection to birth control. He saw that men had more or less even voltages, a little up a little down, whereas women’s sine waves were highly volatile during the time they were about to menstruate. It never came to anything, partly because at the time, birth control more generally was still controversial in the US.

JF: It certainly suggests speculative potential for fertility, that you could perhaps rectify embryonic glitches by balancing the voltage. 

SA: Yes, he didn’t have the tools to investigate why women’s voltages were changing during menstruation. Since then, we’ve accumulated a wealth of understanding about how eggs, for example, as they’re maturing in the follicles, their electrical activity changes. And then there's just a lot of electrical activity that happens as the menstrual cycle gets underway.

The mitochondria are their own little energy producers in the cell, and they have a little membrane around them as well. And the mitochondrial voltage is sometimes used to determine whether an egg is strong enough to use for IVF.

JF: Is anyone mapping the electroscape of the body to find out which organs have what voltage and what voltages are optimal?

SA: So the larger voltage, no, because that’s the last project after you figure out all the other parts. But cellular voltages have been mapped. Every kind of cell likes different ions. I was saying that the nerve cell maintains its -70 by preferring potassium and kicking out sodium, but other cells have different preferences for their ions..

There was a paper that had a whole diagram that I remember giving me nightmares, trying to figure out how this all worked. But different organs have different voltages because once a whole bunch of cells work in concert with the organ system that they are part of, they also end up coordinating their voltages. And it’s almost as if the organ is wrapped in this epithelium and endothelium.  Organ systems also have their own voltage and people have their own voltage. But we’re only just starting to get to grips with how it all works, which is why I’m obsessed and excited about it.

There’s also an electrical rhythm in the gut called the gastric wave. It has nothing to do with digestion. It’s not like the slow peristaltic electrical rhythms. This is a whole different one. It seems to connect the brain-synchronised activity with the stomach, a whole different dimension of the gut-brain axis We tend to assume that the gut-brain axis is only about the chemicals and secretions that the microbiome releases, which then trickles up to the brain. But there is an electrical element to that as well.

JF: It is also how it feels when you get a shock – it really feels like a wave of electricity pulses through your stomach.

SA: Oh my gosh. I never thought about that, but you’re absolutely right!

JF: It feels very primal. What about bioelectricity in animals and plants?

SA: One of the coolest things is how plants use their electrical signalling to communicate with each other, and with other denizens of the soil, because plants have certain electric fields. Flowers and roots each have electric fields that attract certain types of animals and insects beneficial to the plant. Certain flowers have certain electric fields that attract specific pollinators . So many of these interactions include electrical elements.

Plants also use their electrical signals to tell themselves when they’ve been wounded and they activate jasmonates - phytohormones that can in some cases make the leaves so toxic that whatever’s eating it dies. Or if a bunch of caterpillars are starting to infest a leaf, that will set off a cascade of electric signals in the plant, a bit like the action potentials in our nervous system. There are other types of signals too - like variation potentials and surface potentials, and they’re all different. They all tell the plant different things, like different stories about itself. And of course plants can’t run away when there’s danger, so they have to have this whole fast language to talk to themselves about what to do when they’re in trouble.

One of my favourite examples is when you get a little Infestation of caterpillars, the electric signal of wounding activates the jasmonate which can be titrated in such a way that it limits the nutrients in the leaves! That keeps the malnourished caterpillars small, which means they need less food, which then means they won’t eat into the plant’s vital parts.They’re just going to stay little tiny caterpillars. They’ll never get to the point where they’re like, “I’m gonna eat your flower, or whatever the important arterial bits of the plant are, instead, I’m just gonna sit here and munch on your leaf and be happy.”

JF: We need to establish new definitions of intelligence when even a single-celled organism like slime mould can still figure out how to get to its food quickest by remodelling the Tokyo subway.

SA: Yes, so there’s this big push to redefine this. Two of my favourite ways to talk about it are as basal cognition and proto-cognition, because there’s this basic intelligence that all living creatures have, and can we not privilege our brains and all of the baggage they carry so we can understand that the world is this place that has its own cognition. And can we not always try to map our own intelligence onto things? Can we not always try to force Mimosa pudica to be a smart plant or a brainy plant or whatever because it’s not a brain. There is value to the cognition in the world that is not brain mammalian human-driven, right?

JF: The experiment that Monica Gargliano did with Mimosa pudica demonstrated learnt behaviour.  We see it as memory - the plant tailored its response in connection to prior events - but that is also the only language we have to use. It is hard not to anthropomorphize, we need a whole new language around more-than-human intelligence, or to dismantle our own limited understanding of what intelligence looks like.

SA: We always want to see these things through this anthropocentric prism. I think bioelectricity basic research is trying to really understand the bioelectric basis of this pro-cognition, that it might help us finally achieve escape velocity from that. I think it’s such a knee-jerk reaction to always compare everything to this little rigid framework of, is it valuable? Is it like me?

And I think that’s the thing I find so exciting about bioelectricity research because, how else can you interpret a bacterial biofilm, that they’re just like us – that all these separate little bacteria, they coagulate into biofilms, which is their societies. Once they form a biofilm, they’re much harder to kill with antibiotics than individual or small groups of bacteria. They’ve got this centre that is always protected. You can see actually the way they communicate, the way they cohere into a society – the electrical waves that propagate through these communities look a lot like our brain waves, which propagate through our billions of individual brain cells and keep them coherent.

Munehiro Asally at the University of Warwick  is disrupting this electrical signalling, and able to kill the biofilm. So that’s possibly an interesting new approach to our antibiotic resistance problem. But it also tells you that while nobody would say those bacteria are intelligent, or accuse them of having a brain,  their behaviour is incredibly effective and their mechanism of survival is just super-efficient.

Instead of measuring everything by how it stacks up against human intelligence, why not flip the question on its head and ask how our cells stack up with the way other creatures use electrical signalling to coordinate and communicate?

We share this chassis with all other living creatures. Why is everything electric? And basically, Earth is electric, right? Like we live in a giant electric field that is maintaned globally by  the interaction of lightning and ground. This is the environment into which we evolved. Of course we adapted into it - and yet we have just not explored that at all.

JF: One of the sound studies that I’ve been working on compares the sonic landscape and electromagnetic fields of transgenic monoculture soy versus indigenous polyculture amaranth, in Latin America. The transgenic crops are almost silent, no biodiversity, no insects, no birds, the soil and plants are chemically maintained. Agritech has the potential to use electrical signalling to speak the same language of plants to modulate parasites, working with the electromagnetic field in such a way as to support biodiversity.

SA: There’s a Swiss company called Vivent [2] using implants to listen to the electric signals in the plants. They’re basically trying to listen to all these waveforms and using machine learning to try to pick out which particular signals correspond to, for example, thirst. Or fungal disease or low temperatures. They’re using this in the Netherlands actually, which is a seat of tech-forward agriculture. There’s also a company in Australia, I think they’re in Sydney, called Rain Stick. And they are basically trying to revive electro-culture – the idea that when lightning strikes mushroom crops will proliferate. There’s so many people trying to harness this idea, which we’ve known about for a really long time. Also in the 1800s, people were trying to do all kinds of weird little experiments about electrifying water to create fertiliser. So this company Rain Stick has someone on their board who is an indigenous Australian, and he was saying that people always ascribe this idea to Japanese agriculture, whereas it’s less well-known that indigenous Australian people have known the same trick for arguably even longer. In fact, they would  take magnetic rocks and stick them onto the sides of a branch to call down the lightning – it was almost like a little lightning rod that would then hopefully create fertility in the field around it.

JF: Lightning water in alchemy is the catalyst for various states, it was coveted as able to transform any laboratory process.

SA:  In the US, the Nationals Science Foundation has funded the physicist Alexander Volkov to germinate seeds using room-temperature plasma, basically harnessing lightning. You get this ultra-superheated plasma, but in a safe form. There’s even something called a plasma pen, which is how they excise some kinds of cancer. Volkov is applying the plasma to seeds, and believes he can improve agricultural yield by plasma-activating seeds.

JF: Would that be somewhat similar to the activation switch?

SA: Possibly. They don’t know how it works yet. I’ve been trying to prod people but the scientific understanding is just not there yet. Edward Farmer, who found these variation potentials and surface potentials - plants’ versions of action potentials - he’s the OG of plant bioelectricity. He said he’s worried about these plasma-activated seeds because while they will often grow faster and yield more, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. So what is it that you're giving up?

JF: That's the argument with transgenic seeds, because it is based on short-term efficiency over longevity and sustainability. Over time, it requires vast resources to keep these systems going, because each problem is met with another chemical requirement, another plaster on the problem. And there is a point of no return, when the soil lacks organic nutrients and there is zero biodiversity.

SA: So that’s the danger – if we don’t know how it works, but we’re doing it anyway, what are the consequences? Because that’s the way it’s always been done.

JF: This is also interesting when we look at biohacking, particularly the gonzo kind. Let’s talk about squid, the brain and cybernetics?

SA: Here’s the issue with brain implants and cybernetics: everything is viewed from the perspective of the brain as a computer, and when you do that, it makes perfect sense to plug something into the brain and zap it. But as it turns out the brain is not a computer and it gets mad when you penetrate it with a metal thing.

The idea that brains are just computers developed during the 1940s. As computers were first being developed and as brains were first really probed with any precision, there was a bit of concept creep between the two. It was at this time they were looking at the brain and beginning to see certain ‘circuits’ in charge of certain things. Engineering and mathematical language seeped into neuroscience. There’s this interesting advertisement in Life magazine from the 1940s for a Defense Department computer that is billed as being like a smart brain.

Matthew Cobb’s book The Idea of the Brain – which is totally brilliant, super-readable – lays out all the bad metaphors that we’ve had for the brain, because the brain is something we can’t really conceive of.

So when we first built the telegraph, we decided the brain was like a telegraph. And then when we built the computer, we decided the brain is a computer, because after all it’s got circuits and on-off switches. And basically the way that we conceive of the brain is always as the last most complicated thing we built. But we’ve never built anything like the brain, so all our metaphors fall short.

Cobb notes that while this metaphor assembly line has been useful up to a point, we’re actually hitting the inflection point now where our conceptualisation of the brain as a computer is starting to outlive its usefulness.

So for example the biological effects of sticking a metal electric implant into the brain are scarring and gliosis, which is a defence mechanism. After a while the brain walls off the intruder and then you can’t get electric signals anymore.

Also, the only language that a zappy implant speaks is electron, and it just can do bursts of electric fields, which is pretty powerful. But the brain speaks ion, and so what you really want is something that speaks the brain’s language more precisely.

This is where squid chitin comes into play. Several ,materials derived from marine organisms are able to conduct an ion current. In 2010, Marco Rolandi built a transistor from nanofibres of chitosan, a material derived from squid pen, which is the vestigial internal hard bit descended from the animal’s ancestral mollusc shell. It’s soft and pliable enough that a brain implant would likely cause minimal scarring, but its primary appeal is that unlike fancy semiconductors, that act as gatehouses for electron current, this can control the flow of protons - which means controlling the membrane voltage of a cell. This is something unprecedented, and offers huge potential for tailored precision in bioelectrical medicine - combining the power of ion-channel drugs with electroceuticals.

These are ideas for ways to make implants that are less disruptive. Because everything else we’ve done so far is with the sort of stuff that you’d find in your phone. It’s all microprocessors, metal, stuff like that. And, for a long time that’s all we had. But the body just doesn’t really like to be pierced with an electrode.

More biocompatible materials speak the body’s native ion language better than traditional electrodes – like the Utah Array, which is a little sort of pin cushion that get pressed into the top of the cortex to pick up the electrical activities of neurons there. Or deep brain-penetrating electrodes, which are used in Parkinson’s disease to stimulate areas thought to control circuits that have to do with dopamine.

But we may need to rethink the idea of the brain as a computer more generally. For example we had this whole idea of a system of neurons that fire together, wire together, as being the basis of learning, but now they’re starting to find there may not be any real locations when it comes to memory. Or at least they seem to change.That’s not very computery. There’s all kinds of strange new findings that just don’t comport with the metaphor that we’ve developed.

JF: Or someone loses their frontal lobe in an accident, and then everything gets shifted and developed into another part of the brain. I remember a case where a man only discovered he had half a brain at 50, having lived a completely normal existence. Norman Doidge describes these phenomena well in The Brain That Changes Itself.

SA: Yeah, exactly. Location-based “area of the brain” models are outdated.  We have to achieve escape velocity from the narrative of the brain being a computer. But right now, so much is predicated on that. So it’s like we’re at a sort of awkward time right now.

However, nor everything bioelectric depends on the cybernetics metaphor.

Researchers at MIT have created a little glucose battery, the idea being that you could run your biocompatible brain implant off the electrons siphoned out of the glucose in your cerebrospinal fluid, which is interesting in terms of deep brain stimulation. Right now, there’s an issue of where you put the battery. You cannot put a battery in a brain. It would be lethal, so they put the battery in your chest.

If you could harness the body’s electricity to run these instead, then you would not even have to have a r wire coming out of your skull and leading down to the pulse generator in your chest, which would reduce infection risk. 

Generally this is feasible because  our implants are becoming way more low-power. Power consumption will only continue to go down, eventually we will get an implant that needs so little power, it is able to run off glucose electrons.

JF: Is that similar to the Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) you received during the US Defence Department project?

SA: tDCS doesn’t pass electrons; all it does is generate an electric field. It’s a bit of a crapshoot, which is why tDCS sometimes works really well and sometimes doesn’t work at all, and it’s really hard to  even design the studies to find out when it works and when it doesn’t.

While their papers did show that people were able to focus more with two to three times improvement in getting people to expert from novice sharp shooting, we don’t know the mechanisms precisely by which that was accomplished.

Much of tDCS seems to  come down to luck and chance. Ascientist I interviewed for the book was studying different phenotypes of depression. One of them was characterised by a lot of negative self-talk. People who suffer with this are just very self-abusive and just really angry at themselves – a real drumbeat of negative, angry voices in their head. And that keeps them distracted from the world, upset, depressed, feeling hopeless. And she identified  a particular placement of transcranial direct current stimulation electrodes where you basically shut those inner voices down, and those people respond incredibly well to tDCS.

Depression has many variants though, and that’s just one of them. So tDCS might not work at all for somebody who has a different phenotype of depression that maybe is just characterised by not wanting to get out of bed, ever, and just wanting the world to leave them alone. Maybe that kind of electrode placement doesn’t touch that kind. They’re drilling into these subtypes of depression and finding better ways to interface more precisely with the brain, I think that will be a really promising way forward.

I think my experience was really instructive. I don’t really identify as a depressed person, but I did have these very buzzing, loud, self-recriminatory voices that were always telling me everything I was doing wrong. They were just part of the background noise in my day-to-day life. The voices were there when they put me into the control version of the sharpshooter virtual game. I was doing horribly, I was tired and it was embarrassing, just disastrous.

Then they turned on the electricity and all the voices that had been there distracting me were suddenly silenced. I almost don’t know if it’s a hallmark of depression or ADHD or whatever it is – but their absence suddenly made everything really easy. I felt like I could see the world a bit more clearly because I wasn’t constantly having someone tugging on my shoulder being like, “Hey, you suck, by the way, did I tell you suck?” And having that completely gone, I could perceive the world and act upon it, in a really fairly straightforward manner.

And in fact, before that experiment, I hadn’t really noticed them because like I said, they were just elevator music. It was by their absence that I became aware of them. They stayed gone for three days, and the effect waned slowly. Why were they there? How could I make sure they stay gone? There were the new questions in my head. But I also wondered about how much of  expertise comes from just doing things instead of having 20,000 other things taking up your mental workspace.

JF: Yeah we’re always coming out of the now and that’s the way trauma works - it pulls you into the past or future, to second-guess and layer narratives over your experience of the present. So maybe it just collapsed all of those parallel realities and allowed you to just be fully present.

SA: When I talked to the same scientist who was looking at the different phenotypes of depression and we were talking about this, we both came to an ‘aha!’ moment where she was just like, “Oh my God, for you it must have taken off the voices, the TDCS” and maybe it didn’t make me like a killer assassin. Maybe it just made me my normal level of assassin. And, it just took away the noises and distraction. So maybe it revealed something instead of enhancing something.

JF: What about the application of this by the military, particularly the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) as a weapon?

SA: So that’s an open question. That’s just an anecdote of one instance, and an unreliable one because I’m just a narrator, right? When you say this is going to create a generation of sharp shooters, the first question is:  What do we mean by enhancement versus restoration?

It might not be theexact pathway for making someone an expert. What they might be doing for some people is clearing away all the self-doubt that prevents them from becoming an expert and stops them from being in the present moment.

JF: It sounds like it is moving from left brain logic and analytics to right brain intuitive action, when it comes to making a decision to end someone’s life, you need a balance of both.

SA:  I think any worries that tDCS is going to create super soldiers are premature until they get a better kit.

JF: What are the implications of this for the future?

SA: I get the sense that electrical brain stimulation has hit its trough of disillusionment, which is actually a good place to be because that’s when the good science starts to get done –because no one wants to touch it when it is in the disillusionment phase and all sorts of gonzo self-experimentation is going on. It’s just incredible that this field of study has been ignored for so long, it is time for a paradigm shift in our understanding of electricity and how it affects every living process.

Most of the really interesting work right now is going on outside the neuro space. Many cancer and wound healing researchers are doing amazing work with bioelectric mechanisms, but Mike Levin in particular has been looking at regeneration. Instead of using stem cells to painstakingly reseed, or using scaffolding to make new organs, or using various inorganic materials to make prosthetic arms, you could work with the electrical differences between creatures that regenerate and creatures that can’t. There are really profound electrical differences.

These investigations are in their infancy. At the risk of sounding a little woo, bioelectricity is just existential. An electric field is a thing that surrounds every point source, but also every point source exists within an electric field, and they affect each other. And there’s the asymptotic slope - the effect of an electric field never goes to zero. It just gets smaller and smaller past the ability of tools to detect it. But here’s the thing - we keep making more sensitive tools. So no matter how far away you are from something, its electric field can be said to affect you. Science is just starting to figure out how important electric fields are in our evolution. We evolved to make use of them because we’re surrounded and saturated with them.

GO TO: 25, 31, 36, 37, 38, 61/62, 65

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