Do our bodies hum with the same electrical field as lightening? The evidence says it’s possible that the electrical activity in the atmosphere due to lightening has the same background electrical hum happening inside your body.
Recently a few scientists reviewed the evidence for the similarity in electromagnetic frequency in global lightening patterns as they find in the human brain and other animals.
Are you humming with electricity?
They say that constant barrage of electrical activity generated by lightening in the atmosphere creates a kind of hum that resonates at 0-50 Hz, which matches the baseline electrical field of human beings and other animals.
As they reported…
As living organisms evolved over billions of years, the natural electromagnetic resonant frequencies in the atmosphere, continuously generated by global lightning activity, provided the background electric fields for the development of cellular electrical activity…[The research] found that, in some animals, the electrical spectrum is difficult to differentiate from the background atmospheric electric field produced by lightning.”
The Science Daily News – May 2020
Life is always a bit weirder than we realize, and our relationship with electricity and electrical fields is certainly weird.
Our review of previous studies revealed that lightning-related fields may have positive medical applications related to our biological clock (circadian rhythms), spinal cord injuries and maybe other bodily functions related to electrical activity in our bodies…
The Science Daily News – May 2020
The connection between the ever-present electromagnetic fields, between lightning in the atmosphere and human health, may have huge implications in the future for various treatments related to electrical abnormalities in our bodies.”
Kind of sounds like Dr. Frankenstein’s animation of his monster, doesn’t it?
This is just one example of the strange electromagnetic reality of life on earth, and our strange relationship to electricity, which is the basis of our Modern Fundamentals of Chiropractic: electricity keeps you alive.
How does electricity keep us alive at the most basic level? Electrolytes
Electricity is the flow or movement of charged particles (electrons). This flow tends to happen more easily along a conductor, or a material the facilitates the movement of the particles. In your house, that conductor is most likely copper wiring inside the walls. Some people imagine electricity flowing like water in a riverbed.
In the human body, it’s little more complicated than electrons flowing down a conductor wire.
We have certain kinds of charged atoms that we call ions, which are the currency of electrical signals in our body. Sodium, potassium, calcium, and a few other elements are found in the body with certain electrical charges, and we call them electrolytes.
So, our charged particles are electrolytes. And what are our conductor tissues, like that copper wire in your wall? The whole of the human body can be a conductor for electrical energy, because of our large percentage of water content and the presence of electrolytes in the water or fluids bathing most cells.
Neurons are the conducting wires
That said, the most well-known conductor cells are neurons, or nerve cells. Nerves can be many shapes and sizes, but many people are familiar with the a round nerve body and a tail-like extension called the axon. Many axons can be bundled together in a larger root complex.
Neurons have a unique design that allows charged atoms to move in/out and around the cells, creating an electrical gradient (also called an action potential) that allows the cells and tissues to be stimulated, or in some cases, stimulate themselves.
Action potentials (movement of ions) in neurons (nervous system cells) create a signal for the body to release chemicals called neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters flip switches
When neurotransmitters are released, they travel to either stimulate or inhibit the electrical potential of other nearby nerves. You can think of them as signal switches. When it happens in the arm we flex our biceps, carrying signal from one portion of our brain, all the way down the spinal cord, into the nerves that feed the biceps muscle in the arm.
When the process happens in the brain, we do one of a trillion processes, like recall a memory, generate a new idea, smell a scent, or solve a math equation. This symphony of stimulation and inhibition across a variety of neurons is what generates 99.9% of what we experience of life: every movement we make, everything we sense or feel, regulation of the body’s internal organs, and how we interact with the outside world.
The excitable tissue
Besides neurons we have other, special excitable tissues that respond in a unique way to these electrolytes:
- Voluntary muscles (think biceps and triceps and other skeletal muscle)
- Smooth muscles (think digestive muscles of the stomach, and small and large intestine)
- Cardiac muscles (specialized muscle of the heart)
Sometimes these excitable tissues of muscle and heart are also called contractile tissue because they respond directly to the electrical energy of conductor cells (neurons) by contracting and then relaxing.
As a result, the heart beats, and our voluntary muscles and involuntary muscles contract and relax. These are all the processes that generate the same electrical hum that resonates between 0-50 Hz, much like the background resonance created by lightening.
Proprioception and the nervous system
In Part 3 of Modern Fundamentals of Chiropractic: Are you a bag of water? we discussed the way motion influenced our body’s ability to accurately perceive its own location and position (proprioception).
Proprioceptors are special nerve organ cells that are found in many areas of the body, including ligaments (connecting bone to bone), tendons (connecting muscle to bone), skeletal muscles, joint capsules (special ligaments that encapsulates joints and fluid), and even skin.
Motion, pressure, stretch, and other forces stimulate the proprioceptors, which rely on electrical signals to communicate what is happening in the body to the brain.
The body uses this information to make quick decisions about all kinds of processes, including those that affect the position of the spine and our posture.
In recent years, the relationship between the proprioceptive system, the spine, the cerebellum, and a variety of brain functions including higher brain functions, reaction time, muscle strength, and limb control have become better understood.
The electrical gradient of the nervous system is where the body coordinates all these activities for us.
How it fits with the modern fundamentals of chiropractic
To quickly review:
- Fundamental #1 is “Without stimuli we die” – we are sensory creatures first and need information to survive
- Fundamental #2 is “Life is a complex experience of input –> output… or Sensation ->Perception ->Integration ->Response
- Fundamental #3 is “Motion is life“ – The response is mechanical (motion), and mechanical (motion) is chemical and the chemical is mechanical (motion)
When we say that electricity is required for life, and that life is electric, all aspects of the cycle that we recognize as intrinsic to living creatures uses electricity as the currency. All aspects of sensation to perception to integration to response take place in an electrical field with an electrical change.
Which is why to be clinically dead means no electrical activity in the brain. Life is electric.
Electricity keeps you alive!
References
American Friends of Tel Aviv University. “Electrical activity in living organisms mirrors electrical fields in atmosphere.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 May 2020. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200505121642.htm.
Colin Price, Earle Williams, Gal Elhalel, Dave Sentman. Natural ELF fields in the atmosphere and in living organisms. International Journal of Biometeorology, 2020; DOI: 10.1007/s00484-020-01864-6
Images attribution
Components of neuron by Jennifer Walinga, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Membrane Potential Ions by Gibbs-donnan-en.svg: Biezl derivative work: Looie496, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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