The Hidden Science Behind Brain-Computer Interfaces — With Sally Adee

Summary

Big Technology Podcast — "The Hidden Science Behind Brain-Computer Interfaces"

Guest: Sally Adee (science journalist & author of We Are Electric)
Host: Alex Kantrowitz
Date: August 27, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the profound and often misunderstood role of electricity in the human body, focusing on the rapidly evolving field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Science journalist Sally Adee joins Alex to discuss bioelectricity's role in everything from simple sensations to cutting-edge brain implants, the pace of technological and scientific advances in BCIs, ethical quandaries, and future medical breakthroughs like limb regeneration and cancer treatment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Hidden Role of Electricity in Our Bodies

• Electricity as the Basis for Sensation and Action: Every thought, movement, and sensation is driven by electrical impulses, primarily “action potentials,” which have been studied since the 19th century.
  • Quote [02:11]: “Every single thought you have and every sensation you have...is the result of electrical impulses either coming up your nervous system to impart information about the external world to your brain or your brain driving impulses to actuate your limbs.” — Sally Adee
• Cellular Membrane Voltage: Different cell types have unique electrical signatures and these electrical states are essential for their function and identity.

2. How Brain-Computer Interfaces Work

• Reading Signals: Devices like EEG caps can “listen” to overall brain activity but direct electrodes (like Neuralink's array) can target specific regions, such as the motor cortex, enabling the decoding of intention and even speech.
  • Stadium Analogy [05:02]: “It’s basically like if you were going to dangle a mic over a stadium...you can kind of get a sense of like, oh, somebody scored...But if you can drill into the brain…then you can zero in on a much smaller group of neurons.” — Sally Adee
• Life-Changing BCIs: Examples include severely paralyzed individuals feeding themselves chocolate or controlling robotic arms, and now, using neural signals to operate computers and communicate. Adee notes speech decoding is advancing rapidly, with up to “65 words a minute” decoded from intended speech.
  • Technological Miracles [07:30]: Alex shares that watching a Neuralink patient control a computer with intent “was just watching a technological miracle.”

3. Acceleration of BCI Technology

• Why BCIs are Advancing So Fast:
  • Explosive funding from governments, academia, and startups.
  • Improved miniaturization—shifting from devices like the Utah Array (~96 electrodes) to Neuralink's N1 Telepathy implant with over a thousand electrodes.
  • Warning [09:09]: “What I’m a little bit worried about is that the legal, ethical and sort of other infrastructure around it is not moving as fast.” — Sally Adee
• Ethical Lag: Rapid advances are eclipsing oversight, regulation, and planning for long-term care or device failure.

4. Writing Into the Brain: Sensation, Pleasure, and Vision

• Current Capabilities: Writing touch and sensory data into the brain becomes possible—even for lost limbs—and restoring some forms of sight is under active development.
  • On Sight Restoration [18:47]: “Saying that it restores sight is a little bit of a oversimplification....But that is for some reason that...they haven’t been able to make it really work.” — Sally Adee
• Limitations of Restoration: Current attempts to restore sight produce rudimentary, highly pixelated perceptions—described as “very basic...almost just gestalt.”
• Risks of Pleasure Stimulation: Historical (and ethically dubious) experiments show the lure and danger of brain pleasure centers:
  • Quote [21:18]: “They did that to a guy too....He was like, please, I need some way to make myself not gay anymore. And this...unethical Dr....put an electrode...into the guy’s sort of pleasure producing area of the brain....It did not end up working.” — Sally Adee
• Speculation on the Future: While the “pleasure button” phenomenon might arise, habituation and hardware longevity present obstacles. “Maybe. But then you’re going to have to get brain surgery to get it replaced.” — Sally Adee [23:51]

5. Regenerating Limbs: Bioelectric Blueprints

• Animal Models Show Promise: Manipulating the electrical properties of cells immediately post-injury can prompt limb regrowth, even in animals (frogs) that don’t naturally regenerate.
  • On Development [26:54]: “Every other cell in your body actually has its own membrane voltage...As cells develop...with that change in identity comes a perfectly correlated change in electrical identity as well.” — Sally Adee
• Pre-Pattern Experiments: Electrical “ghost” blueprints appear in embryos before features (eyes, nose, mouth) emerge. Disrupting these signals produces severe defects.
• Translational Hopes and Startups: Researchers like Michael Levin are pushing for human trials. “He gets letters from people constantly saying, like, when the hell is it going to be ready?...just put me in the trial.” — Sally Adee [31:58]

6. Bioelectricity and Cancer Treatment

• Cancer Cells Lose Electrical Identity: Malignant cells depolarize, losing their specialized function. Experiments show that “re-polarizing” them may curb or even reverse tumor growth in animal models.
  • Quote [35:14]: “When a cell decides, you know what, screw it, I’m not going to be part of this body society anymore...it also shrugs off its electrical identity.”
• Implications: Drugs targeting ion channels (including some existing anti-epileptics) may be repurposed against cancer, but more replication and validation is needed.

7. Human vs. Machine: Are We So Different?

• Rethinking Binaries: The more we know about the body’s mechanical and electrical workings, the thinner the line between organic and artificial seems.
  • Quote [42:40]: “The difference, I think, for most people is as soon as you know how something works, it becomes a machine....But we look at our brain...and then it’s something magic.” — Sally Adee
  • Adee references “autopoiesis” as the remarkable, self-maintaining nature of the human body.

8. Longevity of Brain Implants and Ethical Infrastructure

• Device Lifespan is Unproven: Electrode arrays often degrade or become isolated by the brain's immune response, undermining long-term efficacy.
  • Quote [46:10]: “The answer is, we don’t know very much.”
  • Examples like Jan Scheuerman illustrate device degradation after a couple of years.
• Corporate Risk & Patient Security: If companies producing implants fail, patients may lose essential hardware, as in the case discussed by ethicist Frederick Gilbert.
• Need for Support Systems: There's an urgent call for legal, financial, and technical safeguards to protect early clinical participants and users as the field matures.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the Stadium Analogy for Reading Brain Signals [05:02]
  “It’s a lot of neuroscientists have told me that it’s basically like if you were going to dangle a mic over a stadium middle of a football game, you can kind of get a sense of like, oh, somebody scored. You don’t know who scored. You don’t know, like individual conversations. But if you can drill into the brain and place an electrode array into the brain...you can zero in on a very much smaller group of neurons.” — Sally Adee

• On the Lightning Speed of Progress and Ethical Lag [09:09]
  “What I’m a little bit worried about is that the legal, ethical and sort of other infrastructure around it is not moving as fast.” — Sally Adee

• On the Emotional Stakes of Implant Removal [46:10]
  “These things, these are brain implants. Suddenly you are able to do things again that you weren’t able to do before. These fuse with your Persona, right? Like this. It becomes part of you.” — Sally Adee

• On Human-Machine Distinctions [42:40]
  “As soon as you know how something works, it becomes a machine.” — Sally Adee

• On Patient Bravery [51:14] “When I met with Noland, I just couldn't get over the bravery that this guy has to say, okay, I'll be the first, and what you learn from me, you can use for others. So there's a true altruism there as well.” — Alex Kantrowitz

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Key Timestamps

• [02:11] — The electrified nature of thought and sensation
• [05:02] — How BCIs read brain signals; stadium analogy
• [07:30] — Witnessing Neuralink: Alex’s “technological miracle”
• [09:09] — Funding explosion and tech’s ethical lag
• [18:47] — Restoring sight; limitations of current approaches
• [21:18] — Pleasure centers: historical experiments and ethical pitfalls
• [26:54] — Electrical cell identity and embryonic development
• [31:58] — Limb regeneration hopes and public demand
• [35:14] — Cancer, depolarization, and new treatment frontiers
• [42:40] — The philosophical divide between humans and machines
• [46:10] — Brain implant longevity and the threat of sudden explant

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Summary Takeaways

• Bioelectricity underpins almost all bodily functions—our bodies are electrical machines at every level.
• Brain-computer interfaces are advancing with unprecedented speed, moving from reading simple intentions to decoding speech and, soon, sensory writing.
• Ethical, legal, and technical preparedness is lagging behind innovation, raising urgent questions of long-term care, device support, and patient autonomy.
• Breakthroughs in manipulating bioelectric patterns may one day allow humans to regenerate limbs or treat cancer by voltages, not just chemistry—a vision no longer pure science fiction.
• The lived experience and subjective integration of BCIs profoundly affect patient identity and autonomy, making robust support frameworks critical as the technology matures.

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For listeners seeking a comprehensive, insightful exploration of how the “hidden” science of electricity in biology could upend our lives—from medical miracles to profound ethical dilemmas—this episode with Sally Adee is essential.

Transcript

[A]

Lets talk about the promise and the danger of brain computer interfaces and how harnessing electricity in our body may change everything about the way we live. That conversation with an award winning science journalist is coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by science journalist Sally Adee, author of the great book We Are electric inside the 200 year hunt for our Body's Bioelectric Code. And in what the future holds, we're going to talk about brain computer interfaces and all the crazy things electricity does in our body. I'm excited for this one. Sally, welcome to the show.

[B]

Thank you so much for having me, Alex. It's nice to be here.

[A]

Great to be here. It's always fun to speak with authors of books who I've read in depth and I read yours in depth while I was preparing to speak with Noland Arbaugh, the first Neuralink patient. Just trying to figure out like, how is this guy actually able to control a computer with his brain? It seems to me like that would be physically impossible. But actually as I went into your book and read it for prep for that interview, I realized that the role of electricity in the body is crazy. It can do everything from help us potentially regenerate limbs, it can potentially be a solution to cancer. I might be overbilling it, but it does unbelievable things. And I just thought when I finished the book, I had to get you on the show to talk to you about all this and bring this story to our readers because it turns out our listeners, really, because it turns out the brain computer interface within Nolan Arbaugh's brain is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. So let me ask you just a broad question to begin with. I mean, I am kind of stunned as a novice to this, that electricity plays a big role in the body. I was like, you have the sort of the bio side of things and then you have the digital side of things. The digital's electricity, the, the bio is like flesh and blood. But actually it turns out electricity plays a very big role in the body. Everything from helping us communicate to basically channeling our physiology in ways. So can you talk just on a high level about the role of electricity in the body?

[B]

Yeah, of course. So the reason that you that we're able to have brain computer interfaces is because we're able to listen to the electrical activity of the brain and the nervous system. And the reason that we can do that is because every single thought you have and every sensation you have, whether it's sight or touch or hearing, this is the result of electrical impulses either coming up your nervous system to impart information about the external world to your brain or your brain driving impulses to actuate your limbs. You know, if you want to scratch an itch, if you want to have a cup of water, you're thirsty, whether you know that you're thirsty to begin with. It's all based on an electrochemical impulse called the action potential. And we've known about this since the 1850s or so. And this is driven forward by something that happens with the cell membrane. So cell membranes, the thing that surrounds the cell at its outside, it's about minus 70 millivolts more negative than the outside environment. And when a message is passed from one neuron to the next, or from one neuron to the muscle, it depolarizes. That means that its electrical activity or its electrical state goes to zero. And this switch, the switching action between minus 70, which is its sort of resting potential, that means it's happy place, basically. And this zero, it's this quite violent electrical event from the perspective of the cell. And this is what drives muscle activity and nerve activity at a speed that, for example, you can yank your hand away from a hot stove before you've even registered that you've touched it. It's really important in giving us more or less real time information about the world around us and an ability to act on it.

[A]

So when we move, that's electricity. When we feel things, that's effectively electricity conveying the message. And that's sort of. When I was reading your book, it all made sense to me about Noland and brain computer interfaces being able to take these electrical signals and translate it to something on the computer. Because effectively, tell me if I have this right, the spine is the conduit from those electrical signals in your brain to your limbs. You have to assign severs, sign severs. Then those electrical signals can't get to the limbs, but you can read them with an electrical device. And that can then, then show up on your computer?

[B]

Absolutely. So what they do is there's many ways to read the summed electrical activity of the brain or single neurons. So we have about 86 billion neurons in the brain. If you just put like an EEG cap on, if you, you know these sensors, you can read all of them. And so you've get this sort of shouting match. Let's. It's. A lot of neuroscientists have told me that it's basically like if you were going to dangle a mic over a stadium middle of a football game, you can kind of get a sense of like, oh, somebody scored. You don't know who scored. You don't know, like individual conversations. But if you can drill into the brain and place an electrode array into the brain, like on the motor cortex, for example, then you can zero in on a very much smaller group of neurons. And if you can get a good amount of neurons in that area that are talking to each other, then you're able to sort of deduce, like, what does that person want to do. So some of the most amazing work in this field right now is at Stanford. They've got people putting these little electrode arrays into the sort of speech and language area. So they're able to actually pick up speech from people who have lost the ability to speak. I think it's going at an incredible rate now. They're able to decode intended speech at a rate of something like 65 words a minute. I want to say I might have gotten that slightly wrong, but. Or maybe outdated already because it's moving so fast. But it's absolutely amazing. And then, of course, with people like the predecessors to neuralink, the brain gate people, they had these little pin cushion looking things that had about 96 to 196 electrodes they put in the motor cortex, where they pick up your intent to move. And then with the assistance of that, when they pick up those electrical signals, they can decode them using signal processing algorithms and then use those to drive robot arms. For example, there was a woman called Jan Scheuerman who was able to feed herself pieces of chocolate with she, of course. Sorry, I didn't mention. She had lost the use of her arms and legs, and she was able to use a robot arm to feed herself a piece of chocolate, move it around. She had it in many different dimensions. So that's what you can do when you can decode the electrical activity of the brain.

[A]

Nolan what was amazing when I visited him was that I saw him basically able to think about moving in his hand in some way. And the cursor moved and he had another thought that he could use that would have the cursor click. We played a video game and he beat me at the video game, which was. It wasn't an easy one. It was sort of like you direct a tank to shoot something and it shoots. And he's also paraplegic. And this neuralink is they've put 64 electrode threads into his brain with a thousand plus total electrodes because there's multiple electrodes there and they're able to decode his thoughts. And to me, I was just like, I've seen four technological miracles in my life. One, I think was the iPhone, just the advance that the iPhone made. Second was ChatGPT. The third was driving in a Waymo car, which, you know, with no driver at all in there. And then I haven't been in one of those.

[B]

Was it great?

[A]

Unbelievable. Yeah, we talk about it a lot on the show. It's pretty special and I think it's just gonna explode. And then the fourth was just watching Nolan control this computer. Just look at it. And his intent was being displayed on, you know, basically moving through a computer screen. And you talked about something interesting. It's moving so fast. And that's something that I came away with when I started doing some research into this as well. Just that it is moving at an incredibly fast pace. And so Sally, I just want to put the question to you. Can you contextualize the speed that this is moving? Because bioelectricity is a multi century study, effectively. And why is it moving as fast as it is right now?

[B]

Well, I think first of all there's the money thing. The funding right now from various groups, government, university, private startups and things is enormous right now. Every time you look at one of these forecasting reports from people like Forrester, you see that the number has jumped another, you know, couple of billion dollars of market, you know, what the market is going to bear. Miniaturization of technology. Of course it has a big sorry of chips, has a lot to do with it. But generally, you know, this technology is. They spent about 20 years using the same type of implant. It's called a Utah Array. It looks like a little pin cushion for a ladybird. Basically. It's tiny. It's got 96 silicon electrodes that jut out of it. 96 is a lot to jam into your skull, I mean into your cortex, but it is not, you know, it has its limitations because the more neurons you listen to, the more you can do, the more signal you can acquire, the more you can. Obviously what you saw Nolan Arbod do is incredible. And that is not the sort of thing you could have done with a Utah Array. Having this new N1, this telepathy implant. It has given a volunteer something like 10 times more than 10 times the amount of electrodes listening in. However, the technology is moving forward. What I'm a little bit worried about is that the legal, ethical and Sort of other infrastructure around it is not moving as fast. Which is kind of funny because the four great miracles that you describe have had the same exact problem, which is that you've got this like fast moving, amazing technology and like five years later, sort of legislators look up from their nap. No, sorry, that's rude. But I mean, they just.

[A]

It's true.

[B]

Sorry, I don't mean to sound like grumpy about it, but I think that these things don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in human beings. And for example, one thing that I worry about is that with your smartphone, like, let's say you got like a cool new smartphone that's made by some startup that has just like blown everybody away. And then two years later, the smartphone company dies off, you stop getting software updates, you stop being able to sort of send the phone somewhere for repairs. You don't really care that much. You know, you're maybe a little bit pissed off about it and you put it in your drawer and you get mad and you get a new smartphone that looks really different when it's a brain implant. And I think this is a really live issue right now with brain implants. The ethics of how to deal with such a new technology, that probably isn't in its. Well, that certainly isn't in its final phase. It looks mature technologically, but in terms of what's required to support it, it's not.

[A]

It's intense. Yeah, definitely. And I definitely have some more of these ethical questions to ask you in the second half, including the length at which these devices are able to remain in the brain. So let's put a pin in that. We're going to come back after the break and talk about that a bit more. I just want to again hit back on this velocity question. This stuff is moving fast. I mean, could you see, are we on pace? And I know it's tough to predict scientific progress, but are we on pace for a vast amount of new capabilities attaching the brain to computers to show up?

[B]

I mean, so my sort of, I guess the area of brain computer interfaces that I've been looking at most deeply is stuff like deep brain stimulation, which is a device that was until recently. Right. Only basically where you stimulate like a very deep part of the brain. For people who have Parkinson's disease, which is a neurodegenerative disorder, that is its symptoms are incredibly cruel. You know, people will, you know, be unable to have a cup of tea because their hand is shaking so much. And, you know, for the past 20ish years, you've been able to put a, an electrical device into the head that shuts that down immediately and people have control over themselves. The other thing that is they've actually started applying this for epilepsy as well for depression. There's another entire group of brain implants that works with helping people. So you know how I was talking about Jan Scheuerman operating a robot arm? Well, there's a researcher among many, there's several people working on this. There's one guy called Chad Bouton at the Feinstein Institute in New York and he's been working on a way to instead of having like picking up people's intent to move their limbs and applying it to a robot arm, basically putting an electrode cuff around your arms and legs and be able to actually move your own arm as if it were a robot arm. So at your own will, which is incredible. What's even more wild is that, you know, you can put a Utah array into the sensory aspect, like a sensory area of your brain that maps to specific fingers. You know, sort of the feeling of sheer force, the feeling of pressure. And they've been able to work, they've been able to actually take a robot arm and prick it on its fingers and the person perceives the sensation as if it was their own. Yeah, as if it was their own. It is amazing. And you know, there's people at in Lausanne who've been able to use a brain implant attached to neurostimulating sort of, they stimulate the leg muscles. So the guy who did not have the ability to walk is now walking again. That it is moving at such an unbelievable rate. Because there's so much buy in right now and there's so much technological advance like now we have insights that are able to leapfrog, you know, other insights and you're everything is speed speeding up very quickly and it is incredible.

[A]

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[B]

Well, so let's go back to sort of the basics. Well, basics, I mean, this is all like incredibly sci fi stuff that didn't even exist when I was little. But like, so what we're doing, what is possible right now, is to write sensory information so that a person can perceive touch again, even from a limb that has been neurologically severed from the brain. So that is called, I think, a neural bypass that they're trying to work on. I think Neuralink is actually working on restoring sight. So that's another sensory aspect.

[A]

That was my second question.

[B]

Yeah, so they've got that blind sight thing.

[A]

Sorry, no, let's. Let's talk about it. I mean, yeah, let's just go. Let's do it right now. So blindsight. That's amazing, right? It's that they're trying to write signals into the visual cortex so the blind can see even if you don't have eyes.

[B]

Yeah, so there have been several. There have been several versions of this in the past. I don't know if this is going to work out any better than the previous ones. I think they've just gotten the person. I haven't really kept up with exactly what the timeline is, but I know that they are giving that another crack. I think what they've done in the past has Been quite. I'm trying to think. Imagine a 1950s computer with just bars on it as a sort of very elementary shapes that are very pixelated. That would be the experience of what people saw when neural interfaces tried to re occasion sight. Basically it's way better than nothing. But I think all the risk versus reward stuff is very much up in the air with that. Saying that it restores sight is a little bit of a oversimplification. So I don't know what blindsight is going to be like with more electrodes. We're going to have to see. But that is.

[A]

If I was. If I was blind and I would see like a pixelated version of the world, I'd be pretty pumped.

[B]

But not. It's. It's. It's even more rudimentary than that. I think people report seeing sort of gestalt. I hate to say that word. I don't know what else to say. It's very basic. Obviously I would also be very pumped because that means you can walk around in the world and not trip over obstacles. And it is a big deal. But that is for some reason that just has not. They haven't been able to make it really work. And you know, blindsight might. We'll see.

[A]

Okay. And then the other sensations.

[B]

Well, cochlear implants, you know, for hearing, those are very.

[A]

What about. There was this study about. They. I'm sure, I think this might be from your book that they gave these rats this electrode in their brain and if. And they could sort of hit a lever that would send a signal to the brain for pleasure and then they just, they just spent all day long hitting that lever and not really doing anything else.

[B]

Yeah, so they did that to a guy too. That was. Oh, they did one of the. Yeah, it's. It's one of the. It's one of the experiments that put brain computer interfaces in the bad books for a long time. I think this was in the 60s or the 70s.

[A]

What did the guy do?

[B]

Well, so here's the problem. Sorry, I've forgotten the name of either. But basically the doctor, this was in the south in the US in the 1960s where being gay was just a real liability at the time. So it could get you fired from any job. And so this guy, he was gay and he was like, please, I need some way to make myself not gay anymore. And this quite unethical. Well, we say today quite unethical Dr. He said, sure, I'll give you a brain implant. And so what he did is he put an Electrode, kind of like a deep brain stimulating electrode into the guy's sort of pleasure producing area of the brain. And then he. Sorry, this is not really for family listeners. But he showed him lots of porn that was, you know, heterosexual. And then he would just turn on the pleasure thing every time the person was watching heterosexual pornography. And then he even procured a prostitute. So he was trying to do almost like, you know, like a behaviorist kind of thing where you just like have the rat in the cage and you're trying to change its behavior by giving it reward, reward, reward. It did not end up working. You know, this person did not end up changing their sexual orientation for reasons I think most of us are pretty familiar with.

[A]

This is so disturbing. And also totally. When you said it gave the field a bad name, I understand why.

[B]

Yeah, it was. Things didn't. Yeah, the scientist was run out of town. So that's.

[A]

Yeah, but. And it showed that this can work. So I'm wondering, do you think there's. This is going to happen again now that brain computer interfaces are becoming more ubiquitous and safer? I mean, obviously in different use cases. I guess what I'm getting at is do you think we're just going to install these electrodes in our head and future people who are sort of having a rough go at it, we'll just be able to hit that pleasure button and have that shock sent there?

[B]

So this is definitely above my pay grade because it requires philosophy. Yeah.

[A]

This is also totally speculative. I'll speculate. I think it's definitely going to happen.

[B]

Well, okay, so I'm going to push back a little bit based on a very tiny amount of knowledge that I have about something called habituation, which is, number one, habituation, which is where if you get used to something too much, then it stops really working for you. So it's possible that zapping this thing over and over and over again will lead to numbness. The other issue that I am just. I apologize, but I'm going to keep just like coming back to this is that, you know, how long is an implant like that going to last in your brain if you keep jamming on the sort of pleasure button because, you know, these things, we haven't come up with one yet that we know of that is going to last more than a couple of years. So. Okay, I think, I think, yeah, maybe. But then you're going to have to get brain surgery to get it replaced.

[A]

Okay, I'm not going to be the early adopter on that, but.

[B]

No, me neither.

[A]

All right, so the world of BCI is fascinating. Again, I read your book in preparation for my conversation with Noland, the neuralink patient, and I think just to push it home, it is incredible the amount of progress that we're seeing. It's moving fast. It's going to potentially do things. It's already doing things like writing as opposed to just reading brain signals. And to me, this is just an area that's going to continue to explode in the tech and the science world. And as it does, there's probably going to be more interest in some of the other use cases and some of the, I think, wilder use cases that you explored in your book, which, again, if electricity is the thing that sends the signals to everything in the body, tells our body what to do, can you manipulate those signals and do things like change the cancer development or help regrow a limb? So let's talk first about limb regeneration and how electricity has been used in some animals to regenerate limbs. In areas that we thought previously that would be physically impossible to do.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. There have been a few studies now that suggest that changing the sort of electrical properties of the cells right after an amputation, this is not in humans, obviously. This was done in tadpoles and frogs. That you could regrow a severed limb in an animal that does not regenerate or that is at a stage where it doesn't regenerate. So they were able to regrow a frog's leg. It. The regrown leg didn't look perfect, but it was functional. So the frog could sort of swim around. The. The feet looked a little messed up, but it was.

[A]

But just by putting electricity on it.

[B]

It wasn't by putting electricity on it. It was by changing the electrical properties of the membrane voltage of the cells. So would you mind if I back up a little bit to sort of explain how that works?

[A]

Yeah, please.

[B]

Do you know how I was saying before the action potentials, the reason that information is passed between nerves or between nerves and muscle, the way that it works electrically, is that there's like a. Like a. A bit of a switch from, you know, the cells, the nerve cells themselves being minus 70°, minus 70 milliliter. Really? Sorry. There's a switch between the nerve cell being -70 millivolts at its membrane and then switching really fast to zero, being completely depolarized. So it's like an electrical switch. You get a negative charge to nothing. Negative charge to nothing. That is an action potential. And so for a really long time, people thought, well, that only exists in the nervous system, like all the other cells, they don't have any use for electricity. Like, they don't have any signals to send. So they're probably not electric. But that is not true. Every other cell in your body actually has its own membrane voltage. So nerves are minus 70. Skin cells are like minus 70. More 65. Musculoskeletal tissue is minus 90. Fat cells are minus 50. Liver cells are minus 40. Newly fertilized egg is zero. And that may sound just like a bunch of numbers that I'm rattling off, but if you notice when you look at, like, you know, the sort of high numbers or low numbers, but in absolute value high numbers, 90, 70, 50, those are cells that have already, like, achieved their electrical identity. Whereas around 0 are the cells that are still in the process of becoming other things. They are. They're depolarized and they just. They haven't become anything yet. Stem cells and, you know, newly fertilized eggs. And so the reason that this is important is that as cells develop, you know, as like a developing embryo develops, as its cells join sort of particular groups like muscle, fat, whatever, nerve, with that change in identity comes a perfectly correlated change in electrical identity as well. And so you can actually see this electrical change in. There's an amazing experiment where this scientist called Dani Adams, she showed in developing frog embryos, you know, they're just a ball. They're just like a smooth ball, you know, still basically just embryonic. But then as you know, it's basically all the cells are dividing and the thing is growing and growing. And. And right before actual features develop, there's this electrical pre pattern that flashes across its face. And it's basically eyes, eyes, nose, mouth, but it's still like a smooth. There's no features. It's just this like, electrical ghost, right? And then a few hours after that, ghost sort of flashes. That's exactly where all the features develop. And the suggestion is that this is how we all develop, that we have to have these electrical blueprints that tell the body how we're going to form. And so, of course, like a good scientist, she did like a loss of function study, which means that she was like, all right, well, what if I mess with the ability for this thing to have the electrical pre pattern? And the result was like, horrific, like, birth defects on the, you know, tadpoles. Like, everything was in the wrong place. She called them Picasso tadpoles. And then when she reinstantiated the ability to make the flashing pre pattern, they were able to have, you know, sort of typical faces. Again. Anyway, the reason that I'm saying this is because. So when you lose a limb, you have an electrical response in those cells that is very different from the electrical response that exists in animals that are able to regenerate full limbs, like starfish, like salamanders. And so what they're looking into is can we, or should we try to figure out how to reinstantiate that developmental bioelectricity that we had, like, as we were developing all of our features, can we basically get the body to just make us a new one? Like, make this. Whatever part of you that has been amputated, just think that it's developing in the womb and so that it just grows itself a new one. So instead of, you know, sort of putting all these pieces back together, regrow something the way that you would in the womb.

[A]

Definitely. And that's definitely something that I would sign up for. I mean, I should fingers crossed that I get to keep all of them. But if I do lose limb, I would be running to any scientist experimenting on this.

[B]

Yeah, Michael Levin. Yeah, Michael Levin, who is one of the people who does the most work in this, he says that he gets letters from people constantly saying, like, when the hell is it going to be ready? Like, I don't care. Like, just put me in the trial because. And he's. I think he's spun out a startup called Morphaceuticals, where he's actually trying to turn this into something that will work for humans. So of course it's ip, so I don't know how it's doing, but, you know, it's. I'm keeping an eye on it.

[A]

I wish him success and hopefully, yeah, we'll hear more about it because, you know, as, again, in a. In an area where there's so much progress that's being made, this area of bioelectricity, Lord almighty, like, that would be such a big breakthrough.

[C]

What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.

[A]

I want a shark that.

[C]

That eats the Internet, that turns it all off unfiltered and unafraid.

[A]

So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote. To the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.

[C]

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[B]

From me, one day, at some point.

[C]

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[B]

False.

[C]

Tell me more. Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[A]

Now, you talked a lot about the different signatures. Different cells or different parts of our body have different electrical signatures. So I want to talk, I want to talk about cancer and how that type of cell has a specific electrical signal. And though it may be a reach, there might be a chance for bioelectricity to change the way that we deal with cancer. So let's do that right after the break. And we're back here on big Technology Podcast with Sally Adee. She's the author of great book We Are electric inside the 200 year hunt for our Body's Bioelectric Code and what the future holds. I guess we're in the what the future holds part of this discussion. And before the break, I teased that cancer cells have a different electrical signature than the rest. And maybe, just maybe, there's a way to use this type of knowledge to help attack cancer. Now, again, this is all experimental. Let's just make that really clear. It's not like this is a clear developed solution. However, it is something that's being worked on. So, Sally, can you bring us up to speed about how this is being used for cancer patients?

[B]

Definitely. And I look forward to the opportunity to bore your audience again with membrane voltage.

[A]

No, we're all in on this. If people are still here, those of us who remain, we are all in. And I know there's a lot that remains. So continue. Sally?

[B]

Yeah, sorry, it's just, yeah, I'm an ion channel boar, so I'm sorry about that. But okay. So again, like, we're going to go back to that membrane voltage of the neuron that was minus 70. And then all the, you know, the musculoskeletal tissue is like a robust minus 90 fat cells minus 50. Well, what's quite interesting, as I said before, you know, you sort of these cellular identities develop in tandem with the electrical identities. But super interesting when a cell decides, you know what, screw it, I'm not going to be part of this body society of cells anymore. I'm just going to eat whatever I want, and I'm going to move wherever I want. I'm not doing this organ nonsense anymore. When it shrugs off its sort of identity in the body, it also shrugs off its electrical identity. So these cells depolarize to zero or near zero, and what happens is. I don't know. Like, one scientist said it was almost a bit like a midlife crisis. They're just like, I don't care anymore. Like, I'm just going to do what I want. So really, really interesting experiments took place at Tufts University, where they were like, okay, so if one part of the incredibly complex and multivariate, you know, cancer situation has to do with the cell's electrical identity at the membrane, what would happen if we decided that we were going to try to keep a cell from depolarizing back to zero? Like, would that also let it hold onto its healthy state and not become cancerous? And so, in a series of experiments, this researcher, Brooke Charnay, and his advisor, who was also Michael Levin, or postdoc overseer, I don't know what you called him, but he basically said. He basically found that if you can keep cells in their sort of healthy electrical identity, they don't start acting cancerous. Then he took it up a notch, and he engineered tadpoles to have. Well, he genetically engineered them to be predisposed to tumors. And while he had engineered them to be predisposed to having tumors, he also prevented, with a sort of complex mix of sort of an ion bath, which kept the identity of the. The electrical identity of the cell from dropping to become depolarized. He was able to keep those tadpoles from developing the tumors. And then in the next experiment, he looked at whether you could take animals that were already sort of ridden with tumors and whether you could reverse the cancer by pushing cancer cells that were depolarized back up into their healthy electrical state. And the answer was yes, those cells decided to rejoin the society of the body, and the tumors went away. So this was a really extraordinary set of experiments that suggested that bioelectric identity of cells, if you can. If you can figure out how to target it and really keep it in the proper set of parameters, you could do a lot. Now, a couple of, you know, caveats.

[A]

Oh, not the caveats I hate.

[B]

No, no, they're not as.

[A]

No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, we should go through it.

[B]

I hate that, too. I'm like, oh, crap.

[A]

But, no, this is. It is amazing. Like, when I read about this in your book, I was also just like, oh my God. Okay, but let's, let's give the full picture here. So we do do nuance on this show. So let's talk through the caveats.

[B]

Well, I just, I'm not sure that it's been replicated, which is always really important. You have to have replication, so you always have to make sure that it wasn't just like something about that particular lab that, you know, made those, you know, tadpoles have no cancer. However, separately, we also know very exciting work at UC Santa Cruz, Marco Rolandi's lab. They're working on this little bioreactor thing that is able to force cells into different electrical identities. They have this very complicated proton pump that they use to, you know, keep them. Because obviously our cells, they like homeostasis, which means that they just like what they like. They're like me. They don't want to try new things, but like, you know, they just don't. They're just like, ah, I'm too old for this. You know, like, keep me where I am. So it's really actually very hard to keep, to, to make a cell get a new electrical identity for like a really long time. But he has made a lot of progress with this really cool bioreactor where he does actually he's been able to keep them in and you know, unnatural to them, new electrical identity, which is massive progress for this because then you now we have a way forward to pushing cells forward, pushing cells out of like an unnaturally depolarized state. And I think one of the other things that's really interesting is that, you know, you don't need to sort of zap cells with an electrical current or come up with some kind of crazy new drug that's going to take 100 years to develop and go through all the clinical trials. Saga, the thing that's really, really interesting is that there are a lot of signs that a lot. There are several at least existing drugs that could probably be repurposed for regeneration or for cancer therapies. And the reason that that is is because we developed a lot of these drugs called ion channel blockers before we knew anything about all of this sort of relevance of the electrome to like anything outside the nervous system. So, for example, you know, antiepileptic medicine. There are hints, strong and really interesting hints in the literature that sometimes if somebody has been on anti. Epileptic, if someone has been on antiepileptics, when they do get cancer, it may not be as fatal. I mean, obviously this is not a call to be like, everybody start taking antiepileptics. But it's just that, you know, there's that crossover between, like, the neuro electrome and like, the wider electrome that is just beginning to be explored. And people are looking really hard at existing ion channel blocker drugs, of which I think, you know, a very high, high percentage of our drugs are channel blockers or openers or whatever. So now we just kind of have to go through this, like, look at this library and be like, well, what else do you do? So it's super exciting.

[A]

Yeah. I want to ask you a weird question now because we've talked so much about how electricity plays a role in the body. And I started out our conversation talking about how I thought we had basically organic on one side, electricity on the other side, and that's actually not the case. These are more interlinked than we think. And of course, we talk a lot about AI on the show, about how we're trying to build artificial life effectively. Not me, but the tech industry. Are we all that different from the machines at the end of the day?

[B]

So that's a super interesting question. So I have two answers to that. The first is philosophically, again, going way out of my lane here. But philosophically, what is the difference between a human and a machine? The difference, I think, for most people is as soon as you know how something works, it becomes a machine. Like the way that we look at our cells when we're just like, oh, there's the organelles and there's the this and the that, and the DNA does this and that, we're like, oh, it's a little, lovely little machine. And. But we look at our brain and we're like, nobody knows how that works. It's huge. And then it's something magic. So I kind of want to push back against the binary between us and machines, because if it's just a matter of some kind of unknown magic of something that we don't know how it works yet, then I'm not sure that that's the proper category to compare us in. And the other thing I wanted to say is that as machines, we are unbelievable. There's this word I learned recently, autopoiesis. And what that means is basically the way that the human body is able to go about its business of daily life. That is just like stunning when you really think about it. So if you were. If you were an airplane, Alex, if you're just an airplane flying around, the stuff your body can do would be the equivalent of being able to keep Flying. Find some jet fuel in midair, like, and then, like, if something breaks off of you, like, rebuilding it or patching it up in midair and just, like, keeping yourself flying with absolutely no, like, really very little outside influence and being completely agential, you know, while doing, like, just having complete agency of that human.

[A]

Body is pretty amazing.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know. I'm not sure that the distinction between machine and human is necessarily. I don't know. I think we need to rethink it a little bit.

[A]

That's a cool answer. And I thought you might go there, reading the book, but it's. It's a pretty interesting way to think about things. And I think we're. I don't want to. I don't want to turn too many people off the show, but I think we're seeing some. Some sort of. I don't want to call it a merge happen, but certainly feels less distance than it might have to me a couple years prior. So I want to ask you. We did tease it in the beginning, and we'd actually spoke about more ethics in the first half, so we don't have to spend the full second half talking about ethics. But I do think there's something that you pointed to in the beginning of our conversation that is worth coming back to, which is just how long can this stuff stay in the human body? Like, that was one of the main questions I had. I actually asked this to Nolan, the Neuralink patient. I was like, nolan, like, you have this in your brain, and we don't really know how long it will last. Now, he does have the backing of Elon Musk. Like, if you're going to have somebody who's going to, you know, be behind your. Your study that you're participating in, probably helps to have one of the richest people in the world, if not the richest people in the world. So there's that. That question is sort of like, is the startup gonna go away? That might be answered. I don't think we have to go too deep into that. But just like the brain's ability to hold a device in is still, I think, kind of unproven. So can you talk a little bit about what we know about how long these devices can stay in the brain?

[B]

Yeah, sure. The answer is, we don't know very much. There have been a few handfuls of patients who've had them who have been implanted since the late 90s, I would say. I think so. Going back to Jan Scheuerman, who was the volunteer in the clinical trial of Braingate, who was able to feed herself the piece of chocolate with her robot arm. So in 2012, there were videos of her all over the place on every news channel doing things with her robot army. And then by about 2014, some of those electrodes in her Utah array had become unresponsive or they were not able to pick up signal. And the reason that this happens is because after some time, the brain gets quite insulted by having an object penetrating into it. You know, these Utah arrays, they will seem incredibly tiny to you if you had one on the tip of your finger, but to your brain it feels pretty invasive. And so the brain responds by sending up sort of the janitorial guys and they build like a little sheath or a protective sheath around the interloper. So that basically it's a protective measure. But what happens is then you can no longer pick up as much signal from the surrounding neurons because you've got this sheath in the way. And for writing, it's also a bit of a problem. So it depends, you know, how long they last in your brain. Depends on whether, number one, the implant is invasive enough and obnoxious enough to the brain for the brain to mount this response. The thing about the neuralink implant is, I think it is much thinner. That's one of the. That was, you know, when they were trying to figure out how to go beyond the Utah array, which was very difficult to conceptualize how you would get past this, how you would. What would be your new model for a brain computer interface for a brain implant, one of the major lines of thought was make it really thin so that your brain wouldn't kind of notice as much. This has now been in one or two volunteers brains for a year at best. So we're not going to know for another two or three years how long or whether the brain will suddenly be like, hang on, there's something in here, let's build a sheath around it. So the answer to that is you don't know. The other thing is what you alluded to in terms of the fact that it's a pretty safe bet at this point to go like, if you're going to get an implant put in your head, it's going to be with neuralink, because you've got like somebody you know, this, this is a startup that is less likely to go bust than any other startups that have put brain implants in people before. There's a philosopher called Frederick Gilbert. He's sort of an. He's an ethicist at the University of Tasmania, who studies brain stimulation and brain implantation. And he had a case study of this very heartbreaking situation where this woman had one of these implants. She didn't have a Utah array. She had a deep brain stimulator for epilepsy. And it helped her so much. But then when Neurovista, the company that put it in, went broke, they demanded that she be explanted. And this is. This was a traumatic event for her because it was like a piece of her was being removed. Because, you know, these things, these are brain implants. Suddenly you are able to do things again that you weren't able to do before. These fuse with your Persona, right? Like this. It becomes part of you. And so this is why I was banging on about the, you know, infrastructure, legal and ethical. Like, what. What do we have to do to make sure that if somebody gets one of these, they can keep it? You know, is it because, you know, do we have to say, you're not liable? Do we set up a fund that, like, ensures that, you know, if somebody needs their battery replaced on an implant that belongs to a startup that got, you know, that went bust a few years ago, like, you can still maintain the battery. Like, there's. There has to be this full set of things set up for people, especially people who are participating in clinical trials. These people, test pilots, they're like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. You know, these people are so sorry. They're just so brave and, like, they are being asked to do things that, you know, most people would be like, oh, no, thank you. I'm not going to be a beta tester. But these people are just like, no, I'm going to put it online. Like, we owe them a really robust infrastructure around which, like, we can ensure that what they've done is not going to, you know, bite them in the ass later.

[A]

Definitely. And look, I think that these are extremely important questions. They also show that the field has come so far that. That we can start to ask them, but they're only gonna get more pressing, I think, as time goes on. And you're totally right. When I met with Noland, I just couldn't get over the bravery that this guy has to say, okay, I'll be the first, and what you learn from me, you can use for others. So there's a true altruism there as well. All right, the book is we are electric inside the 200 year hunt for our Body's Bioelectric code and what the future holds. You could pick it up anywhere. It's been out for a bit, but like I said, I found it while I was researching the Arbaugh interview, and I couldn't believe how good it was. And by the way, if you think that this is crazy, there's even more stuff in there, things about Focus. Sally ran a very interesting experiment with the military on herself that you could read about. So I definitely encourage you to pick up the book. Sally AD Great to see you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[B]

Thank you, Alex. This is been really nice. Thanks so much.

[A]

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for listening. We'll be back on Friday to break down the week's news. Until then, we'll see you next time on big Technology podcast.