6 ms·
Cells use 'bioelectricity' to coordinate and make group decisions
- marojejian 9mo agoEven since reading about Michael Levin's work, I've been sold that there is a lot going on in terms of bioelectricity outside of neurons. But I haven't seen that much progress. This is one interesting, albeit simple example. >In this way, bioelectrical flow across cell membranes lets tissues test which cells are the least healthy and mark them for extrusion. “They’re always pushing against each other and bullying each other. And what they’re doing is probing each other for which one’s the weakest link,” Rosenblatt said. “It’s a community effect.” This fits with my model of how high levels of cooperation succeed in biology. Even in a community as homogeneous as cells you have the risk of defectors (cancer), or just poor members. As such you need a process to continually test your community members.
- FranklinJabar 9mo agoWhy not simply say electricity?
- ggm 9mo agoYou're rght. Light? thats just EMF. Infra Red? Emf. Xrays? It's all EMF man. At least thats ITU regulated frequency bands. I wonder if the ITU regulates biogenic DC signalling frequencies?
- skyberrys 9mo agoThe article notes that bioelectricity is just referring to electricity not occuring in the heart or brain which has a different specialized name. Simply saying electricity is captures more than the cell types reported on.
- FranklinJabar 9mo agoSo this is sort of.. environmentally available electrical potential in the cell? Or is it more constrained than the venues from the heart and the cell to other specific venues?
- nosianu 9mo agoBecause that is useless? The physical phenomenon is so very, very different in biological systems compared to the metal-wire electricity our electrical devices are based on that they are entirely different things. For example, charge carriers are electrons in metal wires vs. ions in biological systems. That has huge implications, because moving around ions is a lot harder, and slower. In a metal wire the electrical field is established from beginning to the end, and that means that the electrons at the end start moving at pretty much the same time as the ones at the other end, no matter how long the wire. That means in a metal wire signals move at a significant fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum, because it is the speed of the electrical field and not that of the charge carriers that matters. In a biological system electrical fields are tiny! The way the signal propagates in an axon is much more cumbersome, expensive, and slow. Speed of signal propagation is ca. 1/2 to at most 100 m/s (for thick myelinated axons). The signal is propagated by jumping in very tiny steps along the axon's inner surface. (https://youtu.be/tOTYO5WrXFU https://youtu.be/tOTYO5WrXFU) This also makes The Matrix movies' main premise about humans as batteries a little strange: Sure, there's lots of electrical activity, but it is in trillions of very tiny places across nanometer distances. And it is created by moving ions around (at great energy cost). So anyway, what actually physically happens in an electrical grid of metal wires, or in a biological system are vastly different things. It is not the same "electricity", the only thing they have in common is that electrical fields and charge carriers (but different ones) are involved. But the way it is structured, created, propagated is entirely different in both cases. When I asked Google out of curiosity what it had to say it showed this: > Despite their differences, both are fundamentally, at their core, the movement of charged particles driven by electrical potential differences. This is just not correct! The "the movement of charged particles" part specifically. Again, wires have one electrical field, but in biological systems propagation is entirely different, and slow, and expensive! The methods used to propagate a signal are not even remotely comparable. That's a difference not even a Radio Yerevan joke could make use of.
- carolosf 9mo agoI think in the original story of the Matrix humans were not batteries but meant to be used as biological GPUs for the machines to run upon. The studio felt that this idea might be too confusing in 1999. So that’s why Morpheus holds up a battery.
- bitwize 9mo agoYes, but how do they handle Byzantine fault tolerance?
- taneq 9mo agoT-cells. :P
- jeffybefffy519 9mo agoCould this lead into how there are people who thing non ionising radiation sources affect them?
- nandomrumber 9mo agoOne acquaintance, after years of trying to work out what was wrong and believing EM missions may play a role turned out to have hemochromotosis (genetic disorder characterized by excessive intestinal absorption of dietary iron, resulting in a pathological increase in total body iron) which is fixed by regular blood donations.
- Noaidi 9mo agoYou’re making an assumption here that it was not the increased iron in her body that made them more sensitive to electromagnetic fields. I mean, I’m not saying it’s true or not, but that’s the mistake you’re making in your argument. I think many people who don’t have EMF sensitivity find EMFs something easy to say is the cause their health issues, but they approach how to figure it out if it is true with zero scientific thought.
- nandomrumber 9mo ago> making an assumption here that it was not the increased iron in her body that made them more sensitive No, I never made that assumption, and didn’t imply anything like that in my post.
- Noaidi 9mo agoYes, I think it is. And I am one of these people who are sensitive to electromagnetic fields. Both radio frequency and lower frequency magnetic and electric fields. No, I’m not running around with a tinfoil hat on thinking that it’s going to kill me, but it does cause me, insomnia, nightmares, and a worsening of my mood disorder. The problem is since voltage gated ion channels are also associated with mood disorders[1] and are, I believe, how EMF’s effect certain people, then it’s easy to play our sensitivity off as just our mood disorder. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3646240/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3646240/
- Torkel 9mo agoHere's a study from 2023 where they apply external electricity to improve healing rate of wounds: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2023/LC/D2LC01045C https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2023/LC/D2LC0... It enabled healing of diabetic wounds that are otherwise hard to heal.
- inshard 9mo agoMichael Levine really opened my mind to phase space in biology.
- mjanx123 9mo agoElectricity is the core of a single cell functionality as well, most biomolecules are on the exact boundary between a conductor and an insulator (and likely switch the state based on other molecules binding, pH, etc). A group of cells electricity is a higher level abstraction of that. https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life-and-the-hidden-role-of-quantum-criticality-ca4707924552 https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life...
- pyaamb 9mo agomakes me wonder what effect a low current flowing through the body would have on this process. would it hinder/disrupt this coordination?
- xg15 9mo agoThe article describes the mechanism in some detail near the end. As I understand it, it's not really "coordination" in the sense that they exchange messages through the electricity. It's more that every cell has to maintain a voltage difference between the inside and outside ("membrane potential"). A healthy cell does that constantly using "ion pumps" that use chemical energy (ATP) to increase the potential. If that potential falls below a certain threshold, certain molecular mechanisms (voltage-sensitive ion channels) inside the cell are triggered that lead to ejection. Interestingly, are also other mechanisms (pressure-sensitive ion channels) that will "intentionally" make it harder for a cell to maintain its potential if it's already weakened or if the surrounding region is very crowded. As such, I think the effect of current would depend on the way how it would change the voltage differences of the individual cells.
- manmal 9mo agoI wonder what the role of inflammation in all this is. It must be a major disrupter (or the effect?) of such electrical comms, with all these cytokines and fluid influx changing things around.
- nprateem 9mo agoIt'll blow their minds when they start researching chi kung and realise it's possible to draw in more energy by breathing and move it round the body. It's also possible to feel some kind of field around the body. Auras and chakras don't sound so silly now do they.
- Terr_ 9mo ago"It'll blow those Chemists' minds when they start researching Alchemy and they realize the incredible power of mercury and lead to rejuvenate the body and lead to an elixir of youth!" "It'll blow those Astronomers' minds when they start researching Astrology and the powerful effect of being born under auspicious constellations!" __________ If the ancient guru knowledge is so great, what testable predictions does it offer, where "auras" are a causal mechanism? In other words, not: "Thou must intake the golden aura of oats and fiber by eating some, to counter the dark brown blockage of your Pu-point." The folk remedy might well solve your constipation, but it wouldn't be evidence for the mythology around it.
- djtango 9mo agoIt feels really great to wield the scientific method and feel supercilious to all other people and ideas that do not arise from such infallible reasoning, and sure the progress of humanity hockey sticked since empiricism took hold. But let's not forget that empiricism is limited by what we can/want/think to measure. Like it's pretty well accepted that breathing exercises have physiological and mental health benefits but it took decades of consumerist appropriation of yoga and other techniques before academia properly found the motivation to earnestly investigate that yes breathing exercises are indeed good for you. As someone who is a deep practitioner of martial arts and athletics, if the metaphors of qi gong and yoga were purely powerful visualisation aids that already provides more than enough tangible benefit. I don't need scientists to tell me that qi is good for my body - I can feel it. So let's keep an open mind, our ancestors were anything but idiots.
- ben_w 9mo ago> So let's keep an open mind, our ancestors were anything but idiots. Just not so open our brains fall out. Our ancestors were just like us, but fewer in number and inventing things from scratch. Miasma, spontaneous generation, Newtonian gravity, these were not people being idiots, and even though they have been shown to be wrong they are still close enough to still be useful today. Phlogiston also wasn't idiotic, but lacks utility vs being correct about oxygen. One of the shared ways we failed then and now is that what sounds true isn't the same as what is true; the modern easy example of this is how easily many of us get fooled by LLMs, and I suspect that's how a lot of ancient religions grew, with additions and copy-errors evolving them to be maximally plausible-sounding to a human mind.
- jupiterelastica 9mo agoFor those interested in more details and quite mind blowing examples, here is a fascinating interview with Michael Levin (one of the researchers mentioned in the article). https://youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s?t=4751 https://youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s?t=4751 Start at 1:19:11, the stuff before is him talking about biology, but from an intelligence perspective. After this time stamp is his retrospective on his bioelectricity research over the years, showing also examples of how they got a frog embryo to produce eyes, and many more things.
- joel_liu 9mo agoThanks for sharing this timestamp - Levin's retrospective on bioelectricity research is compelling. What fascinates me most is how his work challenges the gene-centric view of development. The experiments showing bioelectric patterns can override genetic instructions (like inducing eye formation in non-eye tissue) reveal a whole layer of morphogenetic information we're just beginning to understand.
- nandomrumber 9mo agoI don’t believe genetics ever claimed to provide a theory of why eyes grow where eyes grow. The cells in your eyes have exactly the same DNA as the cells in your big toe, so developmental morphology cannot be explained with DNA alone.
- mojosam 9mo ago> I don’t believe genetics ever claimed to provide a theory of why eyes grow where eyes grow. That’s the whole point of developmental biology, to show how features of the human body form and develop based on gene expression, the timing of which during embryonic and fetal development itself is dictated by your genes. If not your genes, what else would determine why you have eyes in about the same place in your head as every other human? > The cells in your eyes have exactly the same DNA as the cells in your big toe, so developmental morphology cannot be explained with DNA alone. Sure it can, because while every cell has essentially the same DNA, the expression of genes differs between cells, which is what causes cells to differentiate. And this differentiation also controls development; look up the Hox genes as an example.
- zkmon 9mo agoIt was known for a long time that some reflexes and responses are mostly spontaneous and don't require decisions from the mind. Such reactions, such as pulling away when touched a hot surface, do require muscle contraction which in turn requires electrical pulses, which indicates the presence of bio electrical charges everywhere. Can some help me understand what exactly is new here. I knew that something is new.
- Angostura 9mo agoWhat you are talking about is the functional use of electrical impulses to active muscle. This article is talking about electrical potential as signalling mechanism for cell health, than can be used by a tissue to eject aging or sick cells
- gus_massa 9mo agoThats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_reflex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_reflex The "decition" is made by the spinal cord. It's not surprising if you imagine that the brain is an oversized part of the spinal cord. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganglion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganglion
- MichaelZuo 9mo agoIf it’s known some kind of decision making, so to speak, was happening via electrical signals in the spinal cord… why is it suprising that it happens in other types of cells too?
- gus_massa 9mo agoNeurons can do more operations than normal cells. If I can make a bad approximation: * Making circuits with normal cells is like making circuits with resistors and capacitors. * Making circuits with neurons is like adding transistors to the mix. (Please don't take this analogy too seriously, probably biologist and electricians are writing angry replies now.)
- mbeex 9mo agoFrom a layman's perspective, another interesting (somewhat related?) example of a long-range effect that is not determined by neurons themselves (also a recent Quanta article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/once-thought-to-support-neurons-astrocytes-turn-out-to-be-in-charge-20260130/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/once-thought-to-support-neuro...)
- Noaidi 9mo agoPeople can read these articles and go oh cool, but then in the same breath they will say radio frequency electromagnetic fields have no effect on human health.
- azan_ 9mo agoIt's because this article does not show that radio frequency electromagnetic fields have effect on human health.
- Noaidi 9mo agoThat’s because you have to read more than what you read on hacker news. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11298025/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11298025/
- mojosam 9mo agoThis is classic Quanta Magazine sensationalism. Here's what the study actually said: As cells in epithelial tissue get crowded, their membranes start to allow more sodium ions to enter, which makes the cell more electrically positive (depolarization). The cells try to counter this, but cells with insufficient stored energy (ATP) will struggle to do so, and will lose water through their membranes, causing them to shrink, which causes them to signal their neighbors to extrude them. So there's no "group decisions" being made, no "coordination" between cells using "bioelectricity". Yes, all cells rely on electrical potentials across their membranes for normal functioning, potentials that they have to maintain. That's all the involvement of electricity here. And the only "decision-making" happening here is within a single cell, but of course cells don't "make decisions', cells are little machines, and part of the mechanism for epithelial cells -- a mechanism that works in part using chemistry and electricity -- includes the cell signaling that it needs to be extruded in certain circumstances, like shrinkage.
- pinnochio 9mo agoThis is correct.
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- aeternum 9mo agoHow about a chemical causing a flagellum motor to change direction, would you consider that making a decision? and what if there is indirection, IE light triggers some sensor molecule that then triggers the flagellum motor. I guess it all comes down to your definition of decision. The most amazing is mitosis, it sure looks like a massive amount of coordination is required.
- avonmach 9mo agoReminds me of Lakhovsky's book, The Secret of Life
- simmanian 9mo agoMichael Levin's ontology (that the body basically acts as pointers to the mind in Platonic Realm) is so crazy that I want it to be true.
- mmooss 9mo agoVery interesting. Does Levin talk about the Platonic aspects directly? Where can I read about it?
- jmcmichael 9mo agoYes, he discusses the Platonic aspects of his theory in a paper, “Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments”: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5g2xj_v1 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5g2xj_v1
- m-a-t-t-i 9mo agoHere is a page that collects material related to the Platonic space: https://thoughtforms.life/symposium-on-the-platonic-space/ https://thoughtforms.life/symposium-on-the-platonic-space/
- simmanian 9mo agoI find the Q&As on his personal blog the most accessible way to grasp his views: https://thoughtforms.life/qa-from-the-internet-and-recent-presentations-4/ https://thoughtforms.life/qa-from-the-internet-and-recent-pr...
- xaedes 9mo agoRobert O. Becker also studied this. His book "The Body Electric" (1985) was quite interesting. Nice to see some more recent research into this topic.
- mannyv 9mo agoWhat was striking was how much of the cell's energy is spent maintaining that voltage. 25% is a lot.