We Are Electric
Note
Science, much like civilization itself, has endured many wars throughout history. Among those highlighted in the book is the dispute between Galvani and Volta, which divided all Europe in the late eighteenth century and profoundly influenced our contemporary understanding on electricity. During that period, electricity was poorly understood and often regarded as a novelty for entertainment, as exemplified by the “electric kiss”. Luigi Galvani’s experiments with frogs revealed that electricity is responsible for muscle movements. His view, which conceived electricity as God’s “breath of life” was, however, completely overshadowed by the invention of the voltaic pile, an early electric battery. This “artificial” electricity enabled immediate practical applications, including telegraphs, electric lights, and eventually power lines. The author identifies this as the critical moment when the foundational idea on electricity was set: electricity was not for biology but for physics. Consequently, it became associated with engineering, encompassing machinery, telecommunications, and robots. This is true, as honestly I had very little knowledge about bioelectricity.
Fundamentally, I believe that nearly everything observable is shaped by electricity. The second-floor doesn’t collapse under gravity, and our bodies don’t fall apart, all thanks to the electromagnetic force—the force of electricity. It is, therefore, unsurprising that our bodies are electric in some form. However, this book delves much deeper, presenting state-of-the-art research that elucidates how intricately, and perhaps directly, electricity is involved at the functional level in our every movement, perception, and control of our physiological states and even illness.
Despite the years of research efforts aimed at finding new and better ways to interface with our nervous system, all have largely been unsuccessful, as our brains have simply rejected those artificial applications of electricity due to a fundamental mismatch. Could it be that we are fundamentally misunderstanding something?
This book was a true enlightenment for my understanding of electricity, urging me to go beyond imposed disciplinary boundaries in order to truly explore its nature.
Finally, I am stuck by a quote from the last chapter.
“Since when does nature have departments?” Levin likes to tell people. p.290
Highlights
We are fundamentally electrical creatures, but the full extent of our electrification would shock you. It is hard to overstate how wholly and utterly your every movement, perception, and thought are controlled by electrical signals. This is not the electricity that comes from a buttery or the kind that turns on the lights and powers the dishwasher. That kind of electricity is made of electrons, which are negatively charged particles flowing in a current. The human body runs on a very different version: “bioelectricity.” Instead of electrons, these currents are created by the movements of mostly positively charged ions like potassium, sodium, and calcium. This is how all signals travel within the brain and between it and every organ in the body via the nervous systems, enabling perception, motion, and cognition.
p.7-8
The stuff that comes out of your wall socket is created by a power plant. For the stuff in your body, the power plant is you. Every one of the 40 trillion cells in your body is its own little battery with its own little voltage: when it’s at rest, the inside of a cell is (on average) around 70 millivolts more negatively charged than the extracellular soup outside.
p.8
Luigi Galvani’s discovery in the late eighteenth century that electricity is what lets us move our muscles is perhaps the orignal electro-controversy: you may have heard of his experiments zapping frogs, but you might not know that doubts about his findings started a scientific war that divided all Europe.
p.11
People had started fighting about whether the nerve signal was electrical or chemical almost from the moment du Bois-Reymond and Helmholtz started measuring it. But the fight graduated to near war with the discovery of how the signal hops from one cell to the next.
This is because the message hits a little speed bump at the end of the axon. There, it encounters a tiny gap that separates the acon of one cell from the dendrite of another. This gap is called a synapse, christened the same year the Neuron Doctrine won it’s progenitors the Novel.
p.75
After all, an electric signal can’t travel over an air gap in telegraph wires, so why should it be able to do so in the wires of the nervous system?
p.75
Their experiments showed for the first time, in indisputable detail, exactly how the action potential is carried down a neuron by electrically charged particles, without whose electrical properties and activity nothing would happen at all.
p.75
When your skin is intact, it generates an electric potential so that the outer skin surface is always negative with respect to the inner skin layers.
When it gets really interesting, though, is what happens when you cut that skin. You sever the epithelial layers of the epidermis, and when that happens, all those sodium and potassium ions, which had been traveling nicely through the neat pathways offered by their gap junctions, leak haphazardly all over the place. If this were a wire you had cut, you’d be short-circuiting it, meaning electricity would flow in every direction. The neat avenues for the current are gone or smashed-up, and so the ions just pour out into every available space.
p.176
The first proof of concept has been completed: a device that can maintain specific voltage gradients in cells by exerting individual control over ion channels. The other device is a wearable electric tattoo, circuitry made of electric ink drawn on the epithelium.
p.182
The first tough of sperm to egg triggers and immense calcium current that smashes across the egg. Now no other sperm can get in, making it harder for silver-medalist sperm to get over the finish line. This process is so consistent that when researchers zap a calcium current into an egg without sperm present, the egg gets excited and starts turning into an embryo anyway.
p.196
Many research efforts have discovered that you can use bioelectrical properties to distinguish cancer cells from their healthy counterparts, owing to the way they disrupt the flow of electrical currents through the body.
p.231
Bioimpedance
p.231
After testing it in many cells in petri dishes, and watching the voltage dye cause the cancer cells to light up dramatically, testing has begun on live tissue with promising results. However, it’s not available yet.
p.233
cancer not as a breakdown of individual cells but as a breakdown of cellular society.
p.236
The healthy cells around the tumor are just as important as the tumor in determining whether the things can spread. It’s not just the cells themselves but something in their environment (the society) that is falling down on the job of regulating their behavior.
p.236
The interactions between cancer cells and the surrounding bioelectric fields are increasingly recognized as an overlooked but crucial aspect of how cells make decisions based on the state of their neighbors. In this framework, cancer can be viewed as a failure of communication—a fault in the field of information that coordinates individual cell’s ability to be part of a normal living system.
p.236
For years, researchers have toiled to find new and better ways to interface with our nervous system, but have been thwarted by the mechanical, chemical, and electrical properties of existing devices and their fundamental mismatch with our brains.
p.244
As we gain a better understanding of the electrical instructions of biology itself, a sizeable contingent of scientists is beginning to wonder if the ultimate biocompatible material isn’t just…literal biology?
p.245
“Since when does nature have departments?” Levin likes to tell people.
p.290