A volunteer from the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division wears a neurostimulation and brain-monitoring device while clearing an urban scene of enemy combatants in a virtual-reality cave at the Center for Applied Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Tufts University.
In Sally Adee's new book, 'We Are Electric,' she explores the role electricity plays in our bodies and brains and the ways scientists are working to manipulate that bioelectricity for our health and mental wellbeing.
Over the years, it's become increasingly clear to scientists that not only is electricity imperative for life itself, but that manipulating it can have significant impact on our mental and physical health.Sally Adee's new book explores the science of our body's and brain's bioelectricity. I was wearing something called a transcranial direct current stimulation headset, and that's just two electrodes that are generating an electric field.
Then when the electric current turned on, it was like somebody just stuck a bell jar over my head and insulated me from the sort of constant buzz and suddenly I was incredibly calm. And instead of ruminating on every task and how bad I was at doing, I just got on with it. Then all of a sudden that alone supercharged my expertise.
So bioelectricity has had this very long, contentious history, but one place it's totally uncontroversial is in how it works in the nervous system. So the flow of electrically charged particles called ions flow into and out of neurons and controls the release of neurotransmitters, which go across the synapse. And that's how the nervous system signal propagates throughout the body and how the brain passes signals to the limbs to move the body.
Yes, exactly. And then what happens is when the action potential comes through from a neighbouring neuron, it's panic at the disco. Like all of a sudden, all the gates open, all the sodium ions flow in, all the potassium ions flow out and the voltage difference drops to zero. And it's that flipping between 0 and 70 millivolts which passes the action potential down the nerves to the muscles and back.
Over the past couple of decades, people have become much more interested in this because by messing with the ion channels in the skin cells, you can slow down this healing because you're messing with the wound current. With electrical stimulation, it looks like you can speed it up.