New publication: The Bioelectric Code

Friday Brainstorm S3 E2 🧠

I started Friday Brainstorm as a means to explore different interests and share what I’m learning along the way.

What’s kept this journey interesting for me (and hopefully for you all) is the variety. I could spend a month diving into the science of music, switch gears completely, and cover brain-computer interfaces the next month.

But there’s one topic in particular that has continued to be on my mind since I first wrote about it in May 2020.

I have a strong belief that there is untapped wisdom in the energy healing practices developed by several Eastern cultures over thousands of years. All of these practices rely on the concept of “energy”, which has been relegated to the domain of spirituality.

What’s immensely exciting to me is these energy-based practices are finally being examined more rigorously from a scientific perspective.

The emerging field of bioelectricity is starting to unpack the concept of “energy”, and it has the potential to completely change how we think about health and disease.

Since this isn’t the reason that any of you have signed up this newsletter, I’m starting a new publication focused solely on the science of bioelectricity.

(To clarify, I’ll still be posting regularly on Friday Brainstorm. Stay tuned for next week!)

My hope is to make it easier to cut through the noise and find evidence-based coverage of an area that is considered to be pseudoscience by the mainstream.

Apart from my own interpretation, you can also expect interviews with researchers and practitioners on the frontier of this exciting new field.

Here’s a sample of what I’ll be covering:

• The science of acupuncture

• How to train yourself to detect biofields

• How can biofields be measured and imaged?

If this sounds like something you’d like to hear more about, sign up here:

The Bioelectric Code

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Here’s a snippet of the first post:

Since the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, the field of biology has tended to focus on genetics. This focus has produced incredible advances in reading and editing DNA.

There’s an implicit assumption that if you just understand the genetic code (and the proteins encoded by genes), you’ll understand everything about biological systems.

Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University, says there’s more to the story.

It turns out that all cells, not just neurons, produce and sense electrical signals that coordinate cell behavior. This electrical signaling, also called bioelectricity, plays a key role in the process by which a cell, tissue, or organism takes (and maintains) its anatomical shape.

Breaking with standard assumptions, Levin’s research has demonstrated anatomical information is not actually encoded in the DNA. Instead, it’s stored in the bioelectric network of the organism.

Levin and his collaborators have developed tools to read and edit the anatomical information encoded in these bioelectric networks. His lab has been able to create flatworms with two heads, induce frog cells to regenerate a severed limb, and even produce novel life forms – all without modifying any genetic information.

Levin believes that understanding this bioelectric code will give scientists unprecedented control over what cells will build. This represents a new approach to medicine, directing cells in the body towards replacing tissue or organs that have been damaged by disease, trauma, cancer or aging.

Check out the full article on the new publication.