Direct Current and ATP
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The Body Electric is fascinating. A question that perplexes me is why we can't regenerate the way a salamander does, although the book does gives some clues as to why. I have yet to finish that book, as with many books I've begun and never finished reading.
I don't doubt that we are energy beings, and the workings of the mitochondria in powering our body is in many respects a biological generator of energy, with the electrical form being an essential part of it.
Speaking of calcium and magnesium, as well as the electrolytic minerals in general, I can see the body in a state of balance, with the electrolytes in abundance and well utilized as crucial elements, as naturally driven to use electrical impulses to coordinate the workings of the body as one unifies biological machinery.
Calcium is not just something used to build bones, as we can see how the ratio of extracellular calcium to intracellular calcium, at around 15000, is an integral component of a body in balance. Without which the body would be distracted in needless work to try to compensate for a shortfall or excess. The needless work has an opportunity cost, the cost being the machinery becomes less efficient in doing its job as designed by nature in its wisdom, this wisdom being endowed by what we can call God.
Lacking a supply of needed dietary calcium would involve the body wasting energy to mine its store of calcium in its skeletal structure.
It is believed that while this osteoclastic process is underway, osteoclastic processes of bone building cannot proceed. It makes sense logically as the body is mining its calcium stores it cannot build its calcium stores, as building bones would just negate the process of increasing calcium concentration in the ECF.
I am not sure why this is so, but Ray Peat has written in one of his newsletters in his last 2-3 years (if I recall right) that mitochondrial respiration has to give way to other metabolic pathways while osteoclastic activity is ongoing.
My guess is that without the necessary extracellular-intracellular gradient of calcium in place, more harm would result if the body would continue mitochondrial metabolism in such less than ideal conditions.With mitochondrial respiration suppressed, the production of ATP would be much lower, and this would affect the magnesium-ATP complex. With less ATP, there would be magnesium ions orphaned for lack of ATP partners in the previously abundant quantity of magnesium-ATP complex.
A down- regulation of energy generation, supply, and availability would result.This can be expressed as a weakening of electrical impulses, resulting in the impairment of various bodily processes and functions.
Potassium balance would likewise be affected, given that potassium that is normally located in cellular membranes (or in the interface between intracellular and extracellular space, if we don't believe in the existence of cell membranes) would be released to the ECF in exchange for hydronium ions - just to compensate for a more acidic WCF resulting from having the ECF turn more acidic (from mito respiration producing the pH buffering capacity of CO2 giving way to metabolic pathways that produce lactic acid and keto acids).
But this general loss of balance, as far as electrolytes go, can be accompanies by the downregulation of electrical signals, as a natural consequence.
An external source of DC current can be helpful, if only to jumpstart the body back into balance, but not by itself, but together with addressing the imbalance that started it all.
Unfortunately, finding the root cause is the last thing the practice of modern medicine is interested in. So the resulting merry-go-round would water down the usefulness of DC currents in healing.
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@yerrag Excellent description yerrag!!
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@thebodyelectric_ Cool. What is your company and the device, please?
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@annis The name of our company is NeuX Technologies, www.neuxtec.com . We are launching a new website soon. The one we have now is rather vague and incomplete IMO :).
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Thanks. Those are just my musings. No doubt there are many other factors and co-factors and everything is very much dependent on each other, directly or indirectly. How it all ties together is a rather complex web which Ray likens to an active field, and contrasts with the materialistic approach of Cartesian thinking, as explained in his book "Mind and Tissue." It's a very involved read, which I have yet to finish for its breadth and depth. But from what I have read so far I have gained more appreciation for history and philosophy as it relates to science and the arts, as well as the effect of culture in shaping just how the Eastern mind differs from the Western mind, not so much as Asian vs. Caucasian, but more about Hellenistic/Grecian/Orthodox Christian thinking vs. Latin/Western European/Catholic thinking.
Since a lot of our precepts are formed from the Western materialistic perspective, a lot of it is needs to be refreshed and redistilled and resynthesized.
The AI development of recent years, however, seeks to double down on this imperfect materialistic thinking that would have our mind and body considered as no more than a series of mechanism that operates in a fly-by-wire way. It is how the "digital" keeps on intruding in our natural "analog" nature that disturbs and cuts deeper into our true being and relationship with the natural.
In this alienation, our health suffers. From our electrical nature that is implied, we try to superimpose on ourselves an explicit model of this nature. It is not easy and fraught with wrong assumptions that continues to alienate us further from our health.
The masters would prefer to keep us chained to this misdirection in our journey.
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@yerrag
I have not read Mind and Tissue.
I was just re-reading Ray's two articles on Language yesterday, where he touches on your points.Years ago I complained about the digitization of music. My PhD is in Music Theory and Composition. None of my colleagues had any appreciation of what I was saying. I would say, "Sorry, this is not a violin." A digitized rendering of a violin will never match the complexity of analog timbre(s).
Ray did not get his near dying wish to End Oligarchy. End digitization.
Thank you for your response.
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@thebodyelectric_ Thank you. Yup, vague.
I remember Carolyn McMakin with Frequency Specific Microcurrent telling about the 500% increase in ATP in mice using FSM direct current, as published research at NIH. I don't know any science, but I know that using that FSM machine every evening there was never again any muscle soreness after tough workouts. -
I have tremendous success with PEMF, using https://www.micro-pulse.com, and Dr. Bob Dennis, the inventer, is a professor at UNC and holder of some key patents. His work is amazing, and I find this device is something I can’t live without and use every day.
If I have something hurt, I just use PEMF and it goes away. I’m experimenting with systemic exposure via his P9 device.
His technology is very very efficient, with extremely low power and various waveforms you can experiment with.
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@yerrag Beautiful observations about cultural priors filtering or limiting the way we understand any phenomonon of interest and, in particul, our bodies' materialist vs. bioenergetic/bio-electric vs. "other" nature.
In a related vein, Gigerenzer (1991) argued ("From Tools to Theories: A Heuristic of Discovery in Cognitive Psychology" -- link to pdf below) that statistical tools like linear regression were later re-interpreted as "models of mind" where, for example, the influence of personality traits, demographics, etc., exerted additive, linear effects on the likelihood that a decision maker would choose A instead of B. We speak in everyday English about what "weight" the decision maker places on a particular factor. In so doing, we are already invoking a highly structured view based on additive separability rather than seeing factors as multiplicative or exerting or exhibiting nonlinear interdependencies.
Similarly, Gigerenzer argued that computer hardware like random access memory (RAM) chips became metaphorical/analogical "models" of how the human mind worked, prompting (or at least occurring roughly in chronological sequence) psychologists and behavioral scientists to rigorously measure human differences in memory (e.g. random digit recall tests became widely used in studies as a way to compare people with above- or below-average "memory") and then theorize mind in mathematical models where something analogous to digit recall (interpreted as a "human capacity") was thought to play an important explanatory role. Later critics pointed out that not all dimensions of human memory are additive or comparable and that, in healing and forgiving, forgetting could be beneficial (i.e. having the "inverse capacity" to beneficially stop remembering or not place any attention on a past experience).
https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3054012_3/component/file_3054013/contentI think Yerrag's examples were much -- of materialist (e.g. mechanistic fly-wheel) theories of human physiology (recalling Ray's critiques of "receptor" theory drawing on Ling's critique of cell membrane theory) versus bioenenergetic or electrical theories (ala The Body Electric).
Do we think that the bioenergetic or electrical theories are far less developed and that their major contributions are yet to come? Or is it that these theories have been developed already to an impressive degree -- not the least of which have been by Ray and some of those he cited -- but have been obscured? For example, there's another thread on BEF by @Amazoniac posting open debates about gaps in our understanding of the basics of mitochondria and ATP -- and the role of "folded" mitochondria (in heart tissue) that, when folded in the right way, can generate 10x the ATP.
Is there now room in the top-ranked science journals for structured-gel bioelectric theories of ATP to be published, be seen, and be followed/studied by us on BEF?
Yerrag, this general stream of bioenergetic-friendly or bioenergetic-open research now (maybe?) appearing in otherwise mainstream science journals would entail (or at least not preclude, a priori) salamander-like regenerative capacity, or at least explain the demanding set of conditions that enable it (which humans may or may not normally possess), would it not? Hopefully someone starts a thread where we can pin down specifics about salamanders' regenerative capacity and how much is theoretically within humans' reach.
I'm hoping that this forum will serve as a highly functional aggregator of bioenergetic science and names of investigators that help balance or exceed the stifling narrowness of the "materialist" approach that Yerrag's previous post referred to.
https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3054012_3/component/file_3054013/content
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@T-3 said in Direct Current and ATP:
limiting the way we understand any phenomonon of interest and, in particul, our bodies' materialist vs. bioenergetic/bio-electric vs. "other" nature
Just by the way, there is a similar divide in biology or cognitive science:
- some still think that the body/brain is a machine (Mechanism) - i.e. nonsense invented by Descartes
- some modern/better scientists see our body with a brain as ecosystems - complex adaptive systems that have entangled, interconnected, interrelated components with non-linear causality...
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@Regina I have to learn to appreciate music more the way you do. Being from a city like Chicago with a music culture and orchestra, you appreciate the subtlety that comes with the refinements of an analog orientation. I can say that while my exposure to these things is less, I wish it had been more. For as much as I am a nerd at heart, preferring to toy around with nuts and bolts and circuits, and have a preference for science over arts, I have come to realize arts and sciences are like yin and yang, for they need each other. Even more now, as what we create out of our analog mind, with the Holy Spirit within, can never be matched by the onslaught of AI, as much as it is barren of a universal unifying force. It cannot have the creative genius of Tesla nor of Mozart and other greats. It can only replicate but never equal what is formed from God's breath.
I never thought I would think highly of the arts, but it is with much respect for Peat's writing in Mind and Tissue that I gain this perspective. Peat would not be such a force in our understanding of the science of our physiology had his mind not been honed in the arts. Thus, I can see what I lack in what he sees in his appreciation for painting and his passion for Blake.
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@yerrag I think the arts helped me to comprehend motifs, form and architecture and make abstract connections.
I needed them though. I was a dyslexic child and received the weirdest report cards.
Regina is a delightful child with many interests other than math. While her work is very creative, her homework does not reflect what was assigned. At all. Please monitor her work at home so we can resolve this matter.Hahaha. Oh well.
