🍄 Electric Humanity

Analysts project the global bioelectric medicine and electroceuticals market to reach $35.5 billion by 2025. The world is electric. Adjust your frequency.

May 05, 2023

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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. We are living in an electromagnetic world. Everything that surrounds us and is within us is made of energy. Science is looking at the larger electromagnetic fields of the body to understand the systemic effects within, and how we can actually interact with, connect with, and interpret the world around us. With today's magnetoreceptors we’re getting biomagnetic readings that see beyond our bodies being just boxed energy of heartbeats and pulse rates.

I Sing the Body Electric

Like the Earth, our bodies emit a bioelectromagnetic field, often referred to as the “biofield.” This grid-like matrix of light is the health blueprint of our bodies – and it likes to talk.

‘Our whole body is intercommunicating via electrical currents of different kinds—from long distances to the most local distances inside the cell,’ Mae-Wan Ho (1941–2016), geneticist and biophysicist told ALICE in 2006. ‘And can you imagine why? We are coherent to a high degree. We are like a radio, for example, a television.’ A disruption in these electrical currents, however, can lead to illness. ‘They depend on coherent electromagnetic fields and signals in order to work, which is why they can be affected. They can be interfered with.’

Astoundingly, our bodies heal themselves using this electrical network. A study from a research team at UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures found a “sensor mechanism” that allows a living cell to detect an electric field, and that these electric fields may be important in guiding cells into wounds to heal them.

You are Supercharged

We have between about 40 trillion cells in our bodies and each one vibrates a frequency that is creating homeostasis, or balance, within our system. The earth has a natural electromagnetic pulse too, that life form relies on for navigation and development of tissues, such as bone.

Research is showing this pulse has naturally decreased over the last thousand of years—and that now we accelerate that decline with electrosmog from cellphones, computers and microwaves that put undue stress on our cells.

By looking both to the past and the future, subtle energy and biofield science and healing (using the energy in and around the body to facilitate healing) is a growing field of inquiry. Supercharged but ultimately free, science is developing ways in which our own energy can become a power tool.

Frontier medicine is manipulating the naturally occurring electrical fields in our bodies to treat or cure everything from depression to broken bones to cancer and paralysis. Electroceuticals or electric medicine can be delivered as through the skin in wearables or devices, or in the body through tiny implants or ingestible drugs—some remote-controlled for precise treatment, like the brain implants used today to treat Parkinson's disease.

Scientists are now looking at ways to navigate the body's electrical signals—a guide to what needs to be fixed.

Our Electrical Grid

The ancients had a clue to energy routes inside of us. The idea that we are electric is a timeless classic, traceable back to 6000 BCE, to the origins of acupuncture and the fundamentals of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), to Ayurveda and Indigenous medicine. It’s the prana, mana, chakras and qi (pronounced “chee”). The idea that vital energies flow through us has been a mainstay hum for millennia. TCM and modern acupuncturists call them meridians; ancient Vedic texts call them chakras—the subtle energy pathways within us that help keep our systems, organs, and cells vital and in sync. In Western medicine, the same suggestion sparked ridicule just decades ago but now drives studies at Harvard. Myths have become a matter of fact.

Take the body of work by American orthopedic surgeon Robert O. Becker, hired by the U.S. government to study the effects of radio frequency and radiation on the body. When they didn’t like the results they tarnished Becker’s reputation, alongside the contents of his book The Body Electric (1985). His writings are now considered fact.

Becker probed into how bodies heal and how electromagnetic energy can play a role (or not) in this healing. His insights inspired Michael Levin, PhD, American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University (formerly at Wyss Institute, Harvard) to discover how bodies form by using bioelectricity and he studies how cells make collective decisions about growth and shape.

‘The more I studied the use of electric circuits to implement memory and perform computation aimed at creating artificial intelligence,’ Levin told Harvard’s Wyss Institute blog in 2019. ‘The more I thought that surely evolution must have found a way to exploit electricity for its capabilities long before brains showed up; cells and tissues had to start making a lot of complex decisions all the way back at the beginning of multicellular life.’

Get to the Node

The ancients believed that qi (energy) moves throughout the meridian lines of the body, which form a meridian system in addition to the nervous and blood systems. There are twelve main channels that represent major organs (such as heart, liver and lungs) and functions of the body. Think of them as the body’s internal Internet, transmitting information and sending signals. Within these channels are fifteen “collaterals” or nodes which are major arteries connecting to the main meridian lines. This is the network for more than 400 acupuncture points, which some believe that when pressed, stimulate the nervous system, such as producing pain-relieving endorphins. The map of meridians are our energy highways, allowing acupuncturists to send therapeutic signals via the nervous system, helping to direct blood flow to problem areas.

What we cannot track (yet) is the rainbow of energy conversations going on inside us, managed by our subtle energy pathways flowing inside our bodies. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho believed that the signaler inside our body is hydrogen-based—essentially the water in our cells, in our body. Often asked how acupuncture worked, she shared this explanation with ALICE:

“How do you explain how it is that sticking a needle at the side of your little toe, which is supposed to actually represent your eye, can lead to brain waves coming out of the visual cortex in your brain? This has been shown. One explanation is that it is the water aligned on these connective tissues that are the major meridians that are the major energy transport. Energy and information is interchangeable because an electrical signal through these water channels, through these hydrogen bonded daisy chains, would be energy. It would be signal, information signal, because everything is highly organized. Energy is everywhere. So you only need a very weak signal before you can set off a very significant effect. And that is basically how it is possible for our body, our liquid crystalline body, to get organized.” (Thank you Dr. Mae-Wan Ho)

The magnificent flow of subtle energy fields doesn’t stop inside us. Biofield science is an emerging set of ideas that blends the scientific investigation of indigenous subtle energy healing practices with modern research on biological processes and health to describe life in terms of biological fields. These “biofields” are fields of energy, information, and consciousness.

The Heart Field

There’s a nervous system at work in our heart, as defined in the emerging field of neurocardiology, which studies the pathophysiological interplay between the nervous and cardiovascular systems. Research by HeartMath Institute shows that the heart is the most powerful source of electromagnetic energy in the human body — and also sends vibrations and senses emotions outside the body. According to Rollin McCraty, head of research at HeartMath, our emotions are encoded in this “heart field.” This magnetic field is measured in the form of an electrocardiogram (EKG) and can be detected up to three feet away from the body, in all directions. If those emotionally encoded fields can be detected by others and understood in the same manner as internally generated signals, it may help us explain why emotions such as anxiety or hysteria could be contagious.

Electrical Tattoo

John Rogers is a pioneer in the new field of wearable, stretchy, and dissolvent electronics for the body. In 2011 he and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Rogers was then head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, published a paper on their development of an “epidermal (skin) electronic system,” an ultrathin electronic device that stuck to the skin without adhesives or gels. Applied like a temporary tattoo, the device was held in place on the skin by the weak van der Waals electrical forces that exist between molecules of the same substance. The tattooed device could bend, scrunch, and stretch without damaging itself or the skin, and it was able to measure heart rate. Researchers in Japan recently developed an ultra-thin, lightweight e-skin that is stuck to the chest area using water spray and can be worn for a week at a time to track your vital signs. Besides monitoring heart rate and pulse rate, there are clinical tests using electrical skin patches to regenerate skin for faster wound healing.

Welcome to the age of electrically precise medicine!

Leading Indicators:

🧠 Bioelectric Command Center
Imagine a tiny implant that delivers specific neural signals to the body's organs that affect chronic disease—one that you can control with an app. Galvani Bioelectronics is developing electro-therapies to treat disease with precise therapeutic effect through implant-based direct modulation that is minimally invasive in its delivery. These tiny, efficient wireless bioelectronics are implanted through keyhole surgery and controlled by connected software that patients and physicians use to optimize the therapy.

🧠 Ultrasound Healing
The most powerful sound you will never hear, may someday be the sound that could save your life. That sound is focused ultrasound therapy, and most recently it has successful clinical trials as a non-invasive brain "surgery" that drastically improves the lives of people with essential tremor, depression and more. In one case reported, just 44 seconds of focused ultrasound waves got rid of a patient's tremor.

Focused ultrasound therapy directs sound waves at parts of the brain to disrupt faulty brain circuits causing symptoms. An acoustic lens is used to focus multiple beams of ultrasound energy on targets deep in the body with a high degree of precision and accuracy, sparing the adjacent normal tissue. The FDA has approved the use of focused ultrasound for treatment of tremor-dominated Parkinson's disease.

🧠 Go With The Flow
The subtle energy and biofield healing market already has some far-out figures. A 2020 report from the Consciousness & Healing Initiative (CHI) shows that the subtle energy healing market is estimated to possibly generate in excess of $2 billion in revenue a year. The market includes practices such as Reiki, acupuncture and Healing Touch and involves millions of practitioners and patients in the U.S. alone.

🧠 Power, You’re Supplying
The biofield is largely invisible to the average human (unless you are a shaman, energy healer, or aura reader) but can be felt during energy healing sessions such as Reiki, where you may experience a slight temperature change without the healer’s hands touching you.

Reiki is the rising star of the West. Energy healing treatments, training and education are now available at some leading U.S. hospitals, including Memorial Sloan Kettering, the Yale Cancer Center and the Cleveland Clinic. Reiki draws on natural healing vibrations transmitted through the hands of a Reiki practitioner (acting as a conduit) to the body of the recipient. The treatments are often used as complementary therapies to relieve stress, anxiety, and pain.

One hospital leading the charge is New York-Presbyterian, an early adopter of Reiki as part of their integrative therapies program. According to the center's website, most of their patients experience a warm, tingling sensation when receiving Reiki and report feeling calmer and less anxious afterwards, many with diminished pain.

Reiki also resonated with patients at New York’s Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care. Reiki was administered during surgeries performed by Dr. Sheldon Marc Feldman, chief of the Division of Breast Surgery and Surgical Oncology, who noticed that there was less bleeding during surgery, almost no pain was present a day or two after surgery, and patients seemed to heal faster. Feldman has now joined forces with Reiki practitioner Raven Keyes to launch Medical Reiki Works, to support research and education of Reiki in health care.

Books we love

📘 Discover the story of our bioelectric selves in Robert O. Becker’s prescient book The Body Electric that sets the stage for modern research in the healing process leveraging our bioelectricity. (William Morrow 1998)

📘 In We are Electric, science journalist Sally Adee shares new advances in the field of bioelectricity and explores a new scientific understanding of the body's “electrome.” (Hachette Books, 2023)

📘 Tuning into Frequency by Alice in Futureland is a guide to the energy that surrounds us and how tuning into the power of frequencies can help us heal ourselves and the planet. (S&S/Simon Element, 2020)

What else we are wandering

🔍 Earth & Brain Synch
The Earth is pulsating, behaving like one big electric circuit, radiating with an electromagnetic field that surrounds every living thing with a natural frequency. 7.83 Hz is the magic number - the frequency that circulates both the Earth's surface and the ionosphere surrounding the Earth. Mathematically predicted by Dr. Winfried Otto Schumann in 1952, it’s known as the “Schumann resonance.”

Our body and brain resonate with 7.83 Hz. Rutger Wever, a renowned researcher from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, conducted studies of human circadian rhythms (the body's "internal clock") in an underground bunker, shielded against natural magnetic and electric fields. Between 1964 and 1989, this bunker was used to conduct 418 studies among 447 student volunteers, who spent four weeks in the underground bunker. During their stay, the students’ circadian rhythms changed, and they suffered emotional distress, migraine headaches, and generally felt exhausted. When Wever introduced a low-level frequency (7.83Hz), after only a brief exposure the volunteers’ health stabilized. The first astronauts and cosmonauts who, out in space, were no longer exposed to the Schumann waves also reported similar symptoms.

🔍 Hue Do You
Biofield meets new media with Radiant Human, a pop-up portrait practice from New York visual artist Christina Lonsdale. Her roving aura photography laboratory has produced thousands of phantasmagorical Polaroid photographs for the likes of musician Pharrell, actress Zosia Mamet (and her wedding guests) and the staff of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. Lonsdale’s dome-shaped studio has pulled up to Pioneer Works’ Village Fête and set up at Aspen Art Museum. Sitters are shot with an AuraCam 6000 that uses 6,000 sensors to read electromagnetic frequencies from their palm.

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland books
🎧 Alice in Futureland Podcasts
🎧 The Energy of Everything with Andrea Kartika Deierlein, founder of Thrive Reiki🎧 Exploring the Biofield with Dr. Shamini Jain, founder of The Consciousness and Healing Initiative
🎧 Consciousness & Healing with Dr. Shamini Jain
👁‍🗨 Meridians Matrix with Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
👁‍🗨 Energy Transport with Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
👁‍🗨 Electromagnetic Interference with Dr. Mae-Wan Ho