What if electrical activity in the brain is a coincident indicator of brain function, rather than a primary indicator?
One of the huge problems I have thinking about the nervous system in terms of an electrical system is that it’s dogshit slow. Like way slower than you’d expect in a similar system built under the most naive pre-conditions. Like it’s so slow that there is a height limit someone can grow to before the latency is too high to coordinate movement.
And thinking about it a bit more, it doesn’t make sense to me at all that nerves would use electricity in this manner at all, even organisms that do demonstrably use electricity use it more in a sensory context, like sound or vision. Thinking about the simplest vertebrates, electricity is an exotic and unnecessary luxury.
What if the electricity we measure is literally just waste from the chemical reactions that drive these processes? What if “nerve conduction velocity” is actually a measurement of process speed? Applying this directly to the head, this solves a lot of heating and cross talk issues that always seem to get hand waved.
Now this pulls together chemical cognition and electrical stimulation in a really interesting way, if we assume that electrical stimulation seems to be screwing with the normal process reactions. The dose dependency of stimulation seems like it may be correlated to increasingly “sped up”/higher energy chemical processes.
This reminds me of the limitations of defib equipment, if you’re not showing any chemical activity, there’s nothing you can do. However if you’ve even got the littlest bit of chemical processes active, you can charge up all the reactions in the area and hope everything resets correctly.
If you’ve ever had the chance to shock yourself from a continuous source, you’ve had the experience of your muscles tightening to maximum where it feels like it’s more force than should be possible. And it just might be the case. When the circuit disengages there’s that physical rush, like a wave filling in. Maybe this is different for people who aren’t stupid with electricity. Anyway, the big salient point is that a) Muscle contraction usually locks in a way far outside of expectation, and b) damage doesn’t come from the interruption of the circuit but the heating/damage to the cells themselves. As long as the chemical processes can sustain, there’s usually no lasting effect from shock (other than short term memory loss).
What if thinking about conditions like epilepsy in terms of electricity is wrong, and the reason lobectomies end up being required is there’s a metabolic process in one of those circuits that’s stuck wide open while activated, causing a cascade down the nearby astrocyte groups.
It’s weird we don’t have any internal systems which manipulate electricity directly extra-cellularly, the electricity is always part of a conversion process. And why do bodies seem to die at uneven rates? How do electrical circuits even survive environments so prone to disruption?
It’s been curious to me for awhile that brains seem pretty agnostic to the type of stimulation, and working toward these fUS cohorts while tinkering around with tDCS devices makes this weirdness in my face a lot. Ultimately, efficacy is about juicing the chemical process speed.
As always with stuff like this, I’m trying to think am I going to far?! But if we get over the weirdness of it due to our anchoring bias, are there biological processes, including nerve conduction, which can’t be explained through the chemical process alone? Although we talk about action potentials, we still talk about them in terms of chemical ion interactions.
I’m still trying to figure out when we switched over to the idea of electrical currents in the first place, doesn’t look like Cajal mentioned it at all, so it was likely post Berger. Anyone have better information on this?
So this has a lot of really subtle effects, but they are everywhere. Thinking about doing something like spinal regeneration, right now we are mostly failing because we’re thinking in terms of just reconnecting a broken electrical circuit instead of re-establishing the chemical reaction balance between two points.
Edit: The more I think about this the more comfortable I’m getting with it. For one, it represents a drastic simplification of the model and gives us more flexibility to regard organisms as collective entropy management systems.
The aspect I’m liking the most is it gives a single mechanic which can govern any particular interaction between any two cells in the body, and the energy exchange mechanism is front and center instead of being an artifact.
Can we formalize this as the “Catalysis Model” of function?
Also, I’m fully aware of the irony of all this considering my hostility regarding “chemical imbalance theory”.
The interesting thing is we already have system wide, non-electrical signalling, and it’s because it was non-electrical that it’s been ignored for so long. Calcium signalling is at least as robust as astrocyte-neuron signalling.