I’m a science and technology journalist who has reported on neurotech and bioelectricity for over 15 years, for publications includingNew Scientist, IEEE Spectrum and Quartz. After a formative experience in a DARPA brain-stimulation experiment, I began to dig into the history and science of bioelectricity, trying to understand both the science at the level of membrane biophysics, and the history and psychology of how biology lost custody of electricity. My resulting book is an effort to create a repository of the real, rigorous studies that have advanced our understanding of this fascinating science at an accelerating rate in the past 20 to 40 years - and what the new science means about the future.
Every cell in our bodies - bones, skin, nerves, muscle - has a voltage, like a tiny battery. We’ve suspected since the 1700s that this bioelectricity is integral to the brain’s ability to send and receive the body’s messages, underpinning all motion, sensation, and thought. And yet even as it became clear that bioelectric signaling does that and much more, the study of bioelectricity kept being sidelined. Incredible new tools have allowed us to begin to appreciate the true depth and breadth of our electrification.
Bioelectricity is why we develop the way we do in the womb and how our bodies know to heal themselves from injury. When these signals go awry, illness, deformity, and cancer can result. We Are Electric introduces the next frontier of scientific understanding: the body's electrome.
Luigi Galvani found the first evidence that the signals between the brain and the body are electric at the end of the 18th century in Italy.
But his discovery was almost immediately overshadowed by the much more immediately useful invention of the battery. After this, the very idea of bioelectricity fell into disrepute along with Galvani’s reputation.
Neurophysiologist Marco Piccolino and historian of science Marco Bresadola dig into the original controversy over animal electricity and detail how this schism would shape the next 200 years of neuroscience and electrophysiology.
The authors draw on deep-cut archival source material to conclusively restore the unfairly tarnished reputation of Galvani.
This is not a book for people with a mild interest, but will nourish those with an obsessive interest in every detail around the controversy.
"... and still we could never suppose that fortune were to be so friendly to us, such as to allow us to be perhaps the first in handling, as it were, the electricity concealed in nerves, in extracting it from nerves, and, in some way, in putting it under everyone's eyes."
With these words, Luigi Galvani announced to the world in 1791 his discovery that nervous conduction and muscle excitation are electrical phenomena. The result of more than years of intense experimental work, Galvani's milestone achievement concluded a thousand-year scientific search, in a field long dominated by the antiquated beliefs…
Gruesome experiments extended Luigi Galvani’s early work with frog cadavers into human ones.
Victorian-era scientists shocked the bodies of executed prisoners, or sold improbably electrical cures, all in the hopes of finding the answers to questions about the boundary between life and death.
Iwan Rhys Morus chooses four case studies that explain how science got to grips with electricity and its effects on the human body, and what the intersection implied about both.
The book provides lasting insights into why electric medicine is still widely associated with pseudoscience today.
For the Victorians, electricity was the science of spectacle and of wonder. It provided them with new ways of probing the nature of reality and understanding themselves. Luigi Galvani's discovery of 'animal electricity' at the end of the eighteenth century opened up a whole new world of possibilities, in which electricity could cure sickness, restore sexual potency and even raise the dead. In Shocking Bodies, Iwan Rhys Morus explores how the Victorians thought about electricity, and how they tried to use its intimate and corporeal force to answer fundamental questions about life and death. Some even believed that electricity was…
This book tells the story of how bioelectricity was finally accepted in modern neuroscience, how it interacts with biochemical elements of the nervous signal, and how its manipulation led to great medica and scientific advances in the late 20th century.
The author knew several of the leading figures who made these discoveries and provides personal anecdotes about them, as well as illuminating episodes from the history of neuroscience.
What happens during a heart attack? Can someone really die of fright? What is death, anyway? How does electroshock treatment affect the brain? What is consciousness? The answers to these questions lie in the electrical signals constantly traveling through our bodies, driving our thoughts, our movements, and even the beating of our hearts.
The history of how scientists discovered the role of electricity in the human body is a colorful one, filled with extraordinary personalities, fierce debates, and brilliant experiments. Moreover, present-day research on electricity and ion channels has created one of the most exciting fields in science, shedding light…
One of the most common category errors in neuroscience is the conflation of brains with computers.
Matthew Cobb, who is both a scientist and a historian of science provides a breathtaking and sweeping history of our understanding of the brain - and how it always seems to be epitomised by humanity’s most impressive engineering achievements.
So in the 19th century, the nervous system was described as a telegraph; in the 20th and 21st century, it became a computer.
Cobb shows how these evolving metaphors helped advance neuroscience, but also how overindexing on that computer metaphor is beginning to seriously limit our ability to grasp what the brain really is.
This is the story of our quest to understand the most mysterious object in the universe: the human brain.
Today we tend to picture it as a computer. Earlier scientists thought about it in their own technological terms: as a telephone switchboard, or a clock, or all manner of fantastic mechanical or hydraulic devices. Could the right metaphor unlock the its deepest secrets once and for all?
Galloping through centuries of wild speculation and ingenious, sometimes macabre anatomical investigations, scientist and historian Matthew Cobb reveals how…
They say the law is perpetually at least five years behind new developments in technology.
Nowhere is it more important to reverse this phenomenon than in neurotechnology. We may not understand the brain, but that hasn’t stopped neurotech startups and big tech companies from trying to eavesdrop on and interpret its bioelectric signals.
Farahany, a bioethics professor at Duke University, says that this market is expected to reach $21 billion by 2026 largely because it will be a boon for surveillance capitalism. The devices don’t even have to actually tell you what a person is thinking or feeling for the information to be used that way by companies and governments.
People become credulous when AI tells them something, whether it’s a policing or recidivism algorithms. Wearable says you are about to commit a crime or have an affair?
Farahany makes an impassioned argument to build the legal framework that will protect us against these overreaches now, before the tech is too ubiquitous to stop.
Her questions for neurotech will apply broadly as the science of bioelectricity demonstrates its power over and within the rest of the body.
A new dawn of brain tracking and hacking is coming. Will you be prepared for what comes next?
Imagine a world where your brain can be interrogated to learn your political beliefs, your thoughts can be used as evidence of a crime, and your own feelings can be held against you. A world where people who suffer from epilepsy receive alerts moments before a seizure, and the average person can peer into their own mind to eliminate painful memories or cure addictions.
Neuroscience has already made all of this possible today, and neurotechnology will soon become the “universal controller” for…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
Interested in
neuroscience,
the brain,
and
physiology?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
neuroscience,
the brain,
and
physiology.
