We Are Electric

Sally Adee

Description

A NEW SCIENTIST BEST POPULAR SCIENCE BOOK 2023A NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB MUST READ 2023A STYLIST BOOK TO BRING YOU WISDOM IN 2023You may be familiar with the idea of our body's biome - the bacterial fauna that populates our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross the next frontier of scientific understanding: discover your body's electrome. Every cell in our bodies - bones, skin, nerves, muscle - has a voltage, like a tiny battery. This bioelectricity is why our brains can send signals to our bodies, why we develop the way we do in the womb and how our bodies know to heal themselves from injury. When bioelectricity goes awry, illness, deformity and cancer can result. But if we can control or correct this bioelectricity, the implications for our health are remarkable: an undo switch for cancer that could flip malignant cells back into healthy ones; the ability to regenerate cells, organs, even limbs; to slow ageing and so much more. In We Are Electric, award-winning science writer Sally Adee explores the history of bioelectricity: from Galvani's epic eighteenth-century battle with the inventor of the battery, Alessandro Volta, to the medical charlatans claiming to use electricity to cure pretty much anything, to advances in the field helped along by the unusually massive axons of squid. And finally, she journeys into the future of the discipline, through today's laboratories where we are starting to see real-world medical applications being developed. The bioelectric revolution starts here.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Popular culture
• Popular science

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 02 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838853334
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2023
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition published in 2023 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Sally Adee, 2023
The right of Sally Adee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 83885 332 7
Export ISBN 978 1 83885 334 1 eISBN 978 1 83885 333 4
For Ann
CONTENTS
Introduction
Part 1 – Bioelectricity in the Beginning
1 Artificial vs Animal: Galvani, Volta, and the battle for electricity
2 Spectacular pseudoscience: The fall and rise of bioelectricity
Part 2 – Bioelectricity and the Electrome
3 The electrome and the bioelectric code: How to understand our body’s electrical language
Part 3 – Bioelectricity in the Brain and Body
4 Electrifying the heart: How we found useful patterns in our electric signals
5 Artificial memories and sensory implants: The hunt for the neural code
6 The healing spark: The mystery of spinal regeneration
Part 4 – Bioelectricity in Birth and Death
7 In the beginning: The electricity that builds and rebuilds you
8 At the end: The electricity that breaks you back down
Part 5 – Bioelectricity in the Future
9 Swapping silicon for squids: Putting the bio into bioelectronics
10 Electrifying ourselves better: New brains and bodies through electrochemistry
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
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.
Then the Humvee in front of the gate blew up.
Out of the eye-searing blast, I made out the figure of a man running at me, full-speed. He was wearing an explosive vest. I shot him.
A flash of movement to my left revealed a sniper who had just begun to raise his gun. I got him too.
Now a mass of people – maybe seven? – breached the checkpoint, all of them with machine guns. I scanned the group to determine who was closest, who I needed to take out first.
Three more men darted across the roof of a low building that overlooked the checkpoint. I saw them anyway. Bang-bang-bang.
There weren’t any more after that, only the quiet whistle of the desert wind. Still I waited, calm and alert, scanning the horizon.
The lights came up and the tech walked in.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ the tech said, surprised. ‘You’re done.’
‘What do you mean, done?’ I was disappointed. I couldn’t have been inside the simulation for more than three minutes. ‘Can I keep going?’
‘No, it’s over.’
‘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.
She shrugged. ‘All of them.’
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 CO 2 cartridges, and while those can pack a bit of a kick, they don’t do any damage. The people I was firing at were not real; they 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. I had signed up to have a few milliamps from a 9-volt battery sent through my skull to test if it would make me a better shot. The scientists’ hypothesis was that the electrical current would recalibrate a different kind of electricity in my brain: the naturally occurring bioelectric signals that the nervous system relies on to communicate. By overpowering these delicate natural streams with an artificial shock to the executive part of my brain, they hoped to wrench my mind into a state of alertness and concentration – enough to turn this desk-slumping journalist into a battle-ready assassin.
Back in 2011, I was a writer and editor for New Scientist . It was a dream job for which I had recently moved across the ocean. Before that, I reported on microchips and neurotech for a US-based engineering magazine called IEEE Spectrum , an inevitable position for someone with my childhood. My dad is a former radio engineer who filled the basement of our family home with intriguing contraptions – circuit boards, wires wrapped in candy colours, a soldering iron – and a fairly comprehensive mid-twentieth-century back catalogue of a science fiction magazine called Analog . Part of the reason I became a science writer was to watch the ideas from those old sci-fi stories undergo metamorphosis into real science.
That would also explain why I was obsessed from the moment I first caught wind of this mind-boggling military brain-stimulation experiment. I had seen this technique – known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) – bubbling around the science press for a few years. Among other intriguing results, it seemed to improve everything from treatment-resistant depression to poor maths skills. 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 this case, turning me into James Bond).
When I caught my first glimpse of this strange new use for electricity in 2009, it was the stuff of obscure medical trials and secret military projects. Today, the notion of wearing an electrical stimulator on your head isn’t as foreign as it seemed back then; it’s certainly the kind of thing you can imagine someone in Silicon Valley doing for a little extra mental edge, alongside intermittent fasting or microdosing psilocybin.
But it’s not just about boosting your brainpower with a volt jolt – there are many other ways electricity is being used to treat the ailments of body and mind. Take deep brain stimulation, a treatment of last resort for Parkinson’s disease, in which two electrodes the size and shape of uncooked spaghetti are slid into the deepest parts of your brain to quiet the disease’s destructive symptoms. In the wake of its fantastic success, scientists are testing the treatment on other ailments, including epilepsy, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and obesity. Then there’s the rise of ‘electroceuticals’: these rice-grain-sized electrical implants, clamped around nerves in the body, supposedly interrupt their signals, and in rat and pig trials, appeared to reverse diabetes, hypertension, and asthma. 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 £540 million venture to tap into your body’s electrical signals, to try to treat diseases like Crohn’s and diabetes. 1
So when I saw the opportunity to be a guinea pig in a US Defense Department project, of course I jumped at it, and I wasn’t disappointed: my own experience with tDCS was transformative. Getting my neurons slapped around by an electric field instantly sharpened my ability to focus, and by the transitive property, my sharpshooting skills. It also felt incredible – like someone had finally hit the off switch on all the distracting negative self-talk that had, until that moment, been the main provider of my mind’s elevator music. I was a convert, and I wanted to preach the positive power of electricity to anyone who would listen.
When my story detailing the experience was published in New Scientist , it went viral. The timing was perfect: in the early 2010s, Silicon Valley magical thinking was ascendant and everyone aspired to becoming a Soylent-drinking productivity goblin. Transhumanists were desperate for new ways to upgrade their sad meat bodies. Electricity was now poised to join the suite of tools that could help people override their fundamental human limitations. The article became a fixture on ‘DIY tDCS’ forums where amateur neuroengineers traded circuit designs and equipment specs that would let them overclock their brains in their basements. Media coverage saw promise and peril: the producers of science podcast Radiolab were intrigued by tDCS’s ability to engineer artificial zen. The writer and anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari put me into his book Homo Deus as a cautionary tale, a dire warning of humans trying to engineer themselves into gods. South Korean documentary filmmakers wanted me to speculate on whether neurostimulation would transform the human condition. One interviewer called me the Avon Lady of tDCS.
Not that I was the first journalist to look into the promise of manipulating the body’s natural electricity in this way. Since the early 2000s, thousands of studies – many carried out at prestigious universities like Oxford, Harvard, and Charité – have pointed to tDCS as a way to improve the mind. A little bit of electricity enhanced memory, mathematical skills, attention, focus, and creativity – it had even shown promise for post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. The data and the headlines had been accumulating for years, but my gonzo experience took it out of dry clinical stuff and into the ‘it happened to me!’ category. Seeing dollar signs in the combination of intriguing lab results and growing public interest, enterprising start-ups quickly began to hawk their own commercial versions of the brain-enhancing headgear I had road-tested. These cute wearables, which would set you back a few hundred dollars, had little in common with the £10,000 gear in the Defense Department’s suitcase. Nonetheless, they were soon adopted by people looking for any bit of extra mental edge, including high-level athletes. Before every game, the Golden St