Can our brains use electrical field to transmit information from one place to another?
Neural signals are sent via mechanisms such as synaptic transmission, gap junctions, and diffusion processes, but a new study suggests there's another way that our brains transmit information from one place to another.
Researchers in the US have recorded neural spikes travelling too slowly in the brain to be explained by conventional signalling mechanisms. In the absence of other plausible explanations, the scientists believe these brain waves are being transmitted by a weak electrical field, and they've been able to detect one of these in mice.
Paper:
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/48/15800
Article:
http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discover-new-method-of-brain-wave-transmission-electrical-fields
#neuroscience #research
It would be neat if we could evolve this ability overtime -- or change our DNA through the power of meditation. Time to break out my Zen Buddha candles. Concentration Grasshopper... Lolz
ReplyDeleteEvo Lumin totally! Or... Electrical devices even to enhance this ability...
ReplyDeleteCerebro anyone?
too slow for conventional mechanisms? Indeed, I'd expect an electric field to propagate at the speed of light.
ReplyDeleteTelepathy : Why not some wormholes which connect between brains ?
ReplyDeleteThere is a case to make that ordinary speech teleports understanding like quantum teleportation teleports quantum states (quantum teleportation requires non-quantum-transportation to set it up, a bit like transfer of understanding trails the exchange of sounds in ordinary speech).
ReplyDeleteIt means it is not much time left ‘till Google comes up with a cool hat able to read your thoughts. Scary thought.
ReplyDeleteIt reads to me, Boris Borcic, that the electrical field generated by cells in one part of the brain is stimulating neighbouring cells, which then stimulate their neighbors, and so on. So the field itself would propagate at the speed of light, but its effects don't.
ReplyDeleteBodhipaksa Dharmacari A point is that all water chemistry, including all physiology of life, acts through electromagnetic forces anyway. So if you affirm information or excitation propagating via an electric field at the macroscopic scale of the brain cage, but mean that as a shorthand for a more complicated active physiological process on the smaller scale, you really haven't said much.
ReplyDeleteIf you say so, Boris Borcic.
ReplyDeleteThe speed of this flow has multiple meanings.
ReplyDeleteNeurons heavily wrapped in the myelin running down the spine can have signal speeds of up to 180 miles per hour. Neurons that lack this insulation carry a signal at speeds just over half a mile and hour. Nerve fibers instrumental in carrying pain information is the slowest. Pain can take several seconds to reach the brain. The brain actually slows down the signals at times, so it is more a matter of timing than speed.