Electricity is involved in every aspect of life. But could the new science of bioelectricity help cure diseases and ‘upgrade’ humans?
I was back at the checkpoint. The traffic moved as normal. Bored-looking soldiers waved through civilians on foot, dusty cars and rickety trucks full of livestock and produce.
“How many did I get?” I asked, as I surrendered my rifle and headgear, cutting off the flow of electricity that had been coursing through my brain.I was in a grey office park in Southern California, nowhere near any checkpoint in any conflict. In my hands was an M4 close-combat rifle modified to fire harmless cartridges. The people I was firing at had been dreamed up by the programmers of a wall-sized army-training simulation. What was real was the electrical stimulation device on my head.
This flow of electricity, according to the scientists who wired me up, might alter the strength of connections between the neurons in my brain, making them more likely to fire in concert. That natural synchronisation is the basis of all learning and speeding it up with an electrical field would theoretically accelerate the rate at which I could learn a new skill.
In 2016, outstanding early results in human trials, in which they seemed to reverse rheumatoid arthritis, convinced Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to team up with a pharmaceutical multinational on a £540m venture to tap into the body’s electrical signals, to try to treat diseases such as Crohn’s and diabetes.
And then came the inevitable backlash. Sceptics started to wonder if this was all a bit too good to be true. Soon a wave of studies began to debunk the previous glut of hopeful findings: one group electrically stimulated a cadaver and concluded that it was pseudoscientific bullshit; a meta-analysis followed – and concluded that if you averaged out all the effects, you’d end up with nothing.
That’s what it feels like to be every neuron in your body. This is how all signals travel within the brain and between it and every organ in the body via the nervous system. It’s fundamental to our ability to think and talk and walk and why our knee hurts after a fall, and why the scraped skin heals. It’s what makes gummy bears taste sour. It’s how we knew we were thirsty.
This reflects a set of calcified notions embedded in the framework of science: biologists stick to biology, leaving the study of electricity to the physicists and engineers. They just don’t speak the same language. “If you major in biology, you get maybe half a semester of physics, if that,” says physicist and biologist Richard Nuccitelli. “You don’t even touch electrical engineering.”
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