Bioelectricity and the Modern Understanding of the Body’s Natural “Energetic” Intelligence
Classical Chinese views of health and the human body focus on the flows of qi 气 throughout the body’s meridians and between organ systems. Daoists had various “symbolic visions” of the body which could sometimes exist simultaneously and overlap. For example, one could metaphorically view the body as a microcosmic landscape, or in another, as “an administrative system that parallels the bureaucratic systems of the state and of the heavens.”1 Today, it is common to think of the qi that constitutes and animates the “body universe” as a sort of “energy.” Qi can not be fully reduced to bio-electromagnetism, but I think there is little doubt that the latter accounts for an important part of how, in today’s modern scientific terms, we’d account for various phenomena that the classical Chinese system has attributed to qi, and what we also today sometimes colloquially refer to as “energy” in contexts such as the internal arts and similar.
Advances in our understanding of how bioelectricity underlies the natural, collective intelligence of our body’s many cells, and how it is key in the development of anatomy and processes of disease and healing, looks like it could potentially be a major bridge between the ancient Chinese understanding of health and the modern scientific one.
Modern research into bioelectricity continues to uncover how deeply reliant our body is on this aspect of our physiology. We’ve long known about bioelectricity, but its significance has been underappreciated, and it has largely not been integrated into the still predominantly biochemical and molecular biology-based models of human biology. Bioelectricity is not just important for the operation of our brains and nervous systems–cells all throughout the body are operating and communicating via bioelectric networks. Bioelectricity is ancient. Evolution made use of it long before creatures that had brains and nervous systems existed, and it is one of the keys to the natural intelligence exhibited in even much more simple life forms. DNA isn’t enough to fully determine how anatomy is built and structured, the information that is held in the bioelectric circuits created by the many communities of cells in the body act as a sort of collective memory which is also necessary and is analogous to a kind of “software” that works along with the “hardware” of the DNA and other biological components.
Cells can generate resting potentials (voltage across a cell membrane) using ion channels and pumps, and they also have electrical synapses known as gap junctions which allow them to share their state with their neighbors. These channels and gap junctions can be voltage sensitive, creating a situation where channels open or close based on the voltage across the membrane. This “voltage-gated ion conductance” is basically a transistor and enables historicity, feedback loops, and memory. Systems of cells throughout the body can use this bioelectric intelligence to exhibit similar phenomena as found in the brain, but on a slower timescale. Electrical information processing is happening throughout the body that allows the pursuit of various biological goals. This also means that in order for various changes to take place, it is not necessary to micromanage each individual cell and molecule, which would be way too complex, but rather goals can be set at a higher level, at the level of the “bioelectrical blueprint” that is held throughout the network of a community of cells, and these goals can then operate via top-down control and push the complexity onto the system itself.
One researcher who has been making an impact in the field of modern bioelectricity research is Michael Levin. Along with his collaborators at the Levin Lab at Tufts University, Levin has done a lot of fascinating work integrating approaches from developmental biology, computer science, and cognitive science that continues to uncover the amazing intelligence of the collective communities of cells that make up biological systems–including their reliance on bioelectricity. Levin calls bioelectricity “the cognitive glue holding our cells together.” Levin’s work also appears to be contributing to a very important shift in the way we look at diseases like cancer.
If we look at the cells that make up our body as members of these microcosmic communities working together on collective goals, communicating via bioelectric signaling; then cancer is what happens when certain cells have a breakdown in electrical communication. That breakdown in electrical communication takes them out of the collective “mind meld” of the cell community that is harmoniously working together, and turns them into an individual seeking self-serving goals and treating its neighbors as mere “external environmental resources” to be exploited. Cancer seen this way becomes a disorder that is physiological as opposed to being necessarily due to problems with the genetically-specified protein hardware. It also becomes about the way cells behave as parts of communities within the body, and how the border between “self” and “world” can shrink and grow in the microcosm that is individual cells living in the “world” of the body.
Importantly, Levin demonstrated that forcing cells back into proper electrical state, i.e. forcing them back into communication with their neighbors, proved to stop the formation of carcinogenic tumors in tadpoles. By forcing the cell back into the collective “mind meld” with the community of cells working together towards healthy and helpful anatomical goals in the body, it prevents the cell from having these “selfish” individual goals such as “you know what, I’m going to just try and proliferate as much as I can and do whatever suits me as an individual.” For Levin and his colleagues, these findings may eventually lead to new medical technologies that could hopefully offer better alternatives to our current approach to cancer treatment. I feel that this also more generally speaks to the importance of maintaining the bioelectric (or loosely speaking, “energetic”) health of our body’s many systems. In summary, we need ample supplies of bioelectricity, and it needs to be unobstructed throughout the body’s sub-systems, so that everything flows smoothly and is communicating and working together harmoniously. You could replace the word “bioelectricity” with “qi” in that last sentence and it would turn it into a valid statement from the perspective of classical Chinese health theory.
There is still so much that we don’t know about both bioelectricity and also about the inner workings of what, from a modern scientific perspective, is going on inside the body due to arts such as neigong/qigong and neidan (“inner alchemy” meditation). Nonetheless, it is hard to see how new advances in biology like these could not bring modern science closer to the ancient Chinese views which emphasized a holistic view of the body as a microcosmic world of interacting communities (even bureaucracies) who’s health and wellbeing was so heavily dependent on the ample and unobstructed (tong 通) flows of qi (“energy”) throughout.
And beyond the theory, very importantly are the very “energetic” and “bioelectric” feelings of flow along and throughout the various channels and pathways in the body, and the experience of the various energetic centers pulsing and activating that experienced practitioners of the internal arts can directly and palpably feel and even control at will to various degrees. This is the direct, subjective experience of enhancing the body’s supplies qi, bioelectricity, and whatever else (“energy” in a general sense)–enhancing its unobstructed flow, enhancing its ability to interconnect and intercommunicate throughout, learning to guide it and control it at times and let it do its own thing at other times. The ability to feel qi and control it is not something that necessarily comes right away or easily for practitioners of the internal arts, but it is worth the effort. It is also reassuring for a practitioner to have that direct experience of something that is a desirable “energetic” state, according to both the ancient Chinese, and apparently now also the modern perspective as well.
References
1. Pregadio, F. The Alchemical Body in Daoism. https://www.fabriziopregadio.com/files/PREGADIO_The_Alchemical_Body_in_Daoism.pdf
2. Chernet BT, Levin M. Transmembrane voltage potential of somatic cells controls oncogene-mediated tumorigenesis at long-range. Oncotarget. 2014 May 30;5(10):3287-306. doi: 10.18632/oncotarget.1935. PMID: 24830454; PMCID: PMC4102810.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24830454
3. Levin M. Bioelectrical approaches to cancer as a problem of the scaling of the cellular self. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. 2021 October; 165:102-113. doi: 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2021.04.007.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079610721000377
4. Essentia Foundation. Bioelectric Fields: A Paradigm Shift In Biology | Prof. Michael Levin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFMLpZkkH_8
