How Your Brain Makes Its Own Electricity

Light can be measured. All natural things emit radio waves, and your brain "radiates" radio waves, mostly through your eyes. This is at the beginning of Genesis; everything is resonance, and there is sound and light.

This video breaks down how neurons generate and transmit living electricity to power human thoughts, sensations, and movements (0:47).

The Need for Bioelectricity

• The Human Brain Network: The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons (0:17). Each neuron exchanges signals with hundreds or thousands of others, creating a network with more possible connections than stars in a thousand Milky Way galaxies (0:24).
• The Distance Problem: While single-celled organisms rely on slow chemical diffusion to communicate, multicellular bodies need rapid long-distance signaling to react quickly to danger (3:00).
• Biological Telegraph: Humans contain roughly 60 kilometers of neurons stretched out like wires (4:03). Just as the transcontinental telegraph replaced horse-carried mail in 1861, neurons use electrical pulses to transmit messages across long distances almost instantaneously (2:22).

History and Experiments in Bioelectricity

• Luigi Galvani's Discovery: In the late 1700s, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani discovered that static electricity and lightning caused dissected frog legs to twitch (4:17). When touching the legs with two different metals also caused twitches, he proposed that bodies contain an internal "animal electricity" (5:50).
• Alessandro Volta's Battery: Fellow Italian scientist Alessandro Volta argued that the electricity actually came from the two different metals reacting with the fluids in the frog (6:22). This led him to invent the first battery, the voltaic pile, by stacking alternating layers of zinc, copper, and saltwater-soaked paper (6:36).
• Cockroach Leg Demonstration: Host Joe Hanson replicates these historical experiments using a homemade battery and a cockroach leg (8:23). Applying external voltage from the battery—or even the audio signal from a hip-hop track—stimulates the nerves and makes the leg twitch (9:32).
• Measuring Internal Signals: Using a neuron detector without any external battery, Hanson pushes on the cockroach leg to show that mechanical pressure generates internal electrical spikes (10:40). The nervous system encodes the strength of a stimulus by increasing the rate at which neurons fire (11:07).

How Neurons Work (The Action Potential)

• Neuron Anatomy: Almost all animals (except sponges) have neurons composed of a cell body, listening branches called dendrites, a long wire-like axon, and a gap at the end called a synapse (12:18).
• Resting Potential: Like a battery, a resting neuron separates electrical charges (13:33). A cellular pump pushes positively charged sodium ions out and brings positively charged potassium ions in (13:48). Combined with negatively charged proteins inside, the neuron maintains a resting internal voltage of about -70 millivolts (14:03).
• Firing a Signal: When dendrites receive a strong enough chemical signal from a neighboring neuron, the cell reaches a voltage threshold (15:19). Voltage-gated sodium channels suddenly open, allowing positive sodium ions to rush in and spike the internal charge in a millisecond (15:34).
• Resetting the Cell: Sodium doors then slam shut while potassium doors open, letting potassium rush out to drop the voltage back down (15:44). The sodium-potassium pump restores the original balance within five milliseconds (15:57).
• Chain Reaction: This electrical spike, called an action potential, triggers a chain reaction down the axon until it reaches the synapse, where it releases chemicals to stimulate the next neuron (13:26).

The Speed of Thought

• Slow vs. Fast Fibers: Stubbing a toe demonstrates that different nerve fibers carry signals at different speeds, which is why you feel the physical impact instantly but feel the pain a couple of seconds later (16:56).
• Uninsulated Nerves: In slower, uninsulated neurons, action potentials travel between 0.5 and 2 meters per second (about 4.5 miles per hour) (17:09).
• Myelin Insulation: Nerves can drastically increase speed by growing wider or wrapping their axons in a fatty insulation called myelin (17:23). Myelin forces the electrical signal to jump rapidly between gaps called Nodes of Ranvier, boosting signal speeds to 80 to 120 meters per second (roughly 270 miles per hour) (17:36).