We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds

262 Pages·4.363 MB·English

by  Sally Adee

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 cartridges, and while those can pack a bit of a kick, they
2
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.