The term “bioelectricity” generally refers to any electrical energy that is generated by a living organism. This includes plants, insects, birds, animals, and the intelligent animal – humans. It is measurable, usually at very low voltages, as
If the measured voltages are so low, what then, is this “tremendous power” which I promised in the title? Read on.
The potential difference (voltage) across every single cell in your body is 1.4 volts. The average human body is made up of 37.2 trillion individual cells. If they were all connected in series that would produce 52.08 trillion volts of potential. The same as around 18.5 billion nuclear power station generators! Do you feel powerful enough yet?
Chi and bioelectricity
What we call “life force energy” has been a central facet of traditional Chinese medicine for millennia. Other cultures also have a similar concept, for example, “prana” in India and “ki” in Japan.
What is chi made of?
Chi is a form of energy just as heat, light and motion are forms of energy. As chi is life force energy, it emerges from a combination of energy forms working in parallel. Bioelectricity is almost certainly a component of chi, but so is consciousness, heat, light, movement, etc.
There is a train of thought that says chi taps into our body’s bioelectric energy and that this can be manipulated. That through practice and meditation, it is possible to direct some of the massive amounts of contained energy and promote healing via heat and circulation.
We know that life, when you boil it right down, is a flow of electrons: “You eat sugars that have excess electrons, and you breathe in oxygen that willingly takes them.” Our cells break down the sugars, and the electrons flow through them in a complex set of chemical reactions until they are passed on to electron-hungry oxygen.
Kenneth Nealson quoted from an article in New Scientist
Scientists have long known that the body emits biophotons. A photon is a packet of electromagnetic energy that has zero mass at rest and moves at the speed of light in a vacuum. Recently tests have been carried out and measurements made on chi practitioners who showed an 800x increase in the amount of biophotons emitting from them. These results would strongly indicate that chi energy and bioelectricity are intertwined.
Bioelectrical manipulation
If you have seen the Star Wars movies you will have watched the Sith Lord shoot “force lightning” from out of the ends of his fingers. This dark-side energy was used to incapacitate and probably kill other people/beings.
Since we know that there is a ridiculous amount of potential voltage contained within our bodies, and that bioelectrical energy can be consciously directed, doesn’t that mean that we, too, should be able to shoot force lightning from our fingers?
There are a few problems with that. The main one being the heat produced would fry our hands (actually our whole body). Also, before we reached the voltage level to produce big sparks from our fingers, we would have probably electrocuted ourselves by the sudden rush of electrons towards our hands.
Back in the realm of reality, what can we do to manipulate the very real bioelectrical energy that we all possess?
There are ways to manipulate your own bioelectricity. Making sure you have a good oxygen supply by deep breathing, or breathing pure oxygen, will increase electrical activity in your body. Oxygen attracts electrons from sugars in your body. The process is more complex than only that but this mass movement of electrons from simple sugar to oxygen is highly energetic. In fact it keeps you alive.
Another way is with feelings and emotions. You can request a research paper by
M N Rusalova and M B Kostyunina titled “Asymmetry of the Bioelectric Cerebral Activity during Negative Emotions”
The title would suggest that emotions have an influence over bioelectric activity at least in the brain. In fact, thoughts and emotions completely light up the entire body with bioelectric activity. Most of us would rather experience positive emotions, however, and the way to do this is to purposefully think positive thoughts.
How do we “purposefully think positive thoughts”?
As an example, almost everyone has had at least one moment in life where they felt good. Recall one of these moments and relive it as fully as possible. Try to recreate the great feeling you had. The flood of emotion, the completeness, whatever it was that you experienced.
If you did the above activity, you just manipulated your bioelectricity.
Bioelectric healing
The body’s ability to heal itself is one of its most astounding characteristics. The history of the world’s entire medical development has been based upon assisting the body to heal itself when it needs to.
Any healing process is essentially bioelectric. If the body is healing a wound or a broken bone, the cells are (to simplify things a lot) organizing themselves bioelectrically in order to rebuild the new tissue or bone. If the healing is of a mental or emotional nature, then the brain must rewire neural pathways to produce the desired improvement in state of mind or mood.
If you combine the two processes, the conscious and the subconscious, by deliberately visualizing and feeling healing taking place, then results can be amplified quite dramatically.
One way to demonstrate the involvement of bioelectricity in the developmental process is to hinder the electric signals that happen between cells and observe the effects. That’s exactly what scientists did with experiments on tadpoles.
This article from ZME Science explains how tadpole tissue and brain development was hampered when bioelectric signals were reduced or blocked between cells.
Conversely, this article from The Smithsonian Institute details how depolarizing the tadpole’s cells, which means reducing the charge between the inner and outer cell membrane, caused enhanced infection-fighting abilities. If the charge is reduced, it could mean that electrons are able to flow more freely, thereby increasing bioelectrical activity.
These experiments have not been tried on humans yet, but the results seem to affirm that bioelectricity is an integral part of the biological healing and development process.
Conclusion
You may find it fascinating to think that we are basically electrical beings powering a physical body. The fact that there is so much electrical activity within us all warrants a lot more research into this phenomenon. While the processes are not at all as simple as plugging a vacuum cleaner into a wall socket and flipping a switch to get it to run, the actual energy transfer between electrons is exactly the same. Knowing that all 37.2 trillion cells that make up your body possess an electric charge is, by itself, empowering.