Dr Karl

In a copper wire, you have the...

information transferred from copper atom to copper atom to copper atom along the electrons, but also in a wave through the air around it, travelling at the speed of light.

And you can look this up on Veritasium.

They've done a really good video and Peter Lebedev was involved with that.

But then in the human nerve, it's different.

Imagine there's a pipe, like a garden hose.

And it resists electrical charges going across it.

And there's all sorts of electric charges in the body.

There's sodium ions, potassium ions, calcium ions, chloride ions.

And suddenly the...

like a ring of this garden hose loses its ability to stop charge going across and charge goes across and then it restores itself immediately and this wave of depolarization runs along the nerve

quickly in big nerves, slower in small nerves, and reaches the other end.

At the other end of the nerve, it then causes little chemicals to be released from what they call the synaptic bulb, and these chemicals travel a very tiny distance, like 20 billionths of a metre, and they fit into little receptors on the next nerve, and then that sets off another action potential.

So you've got this weird thing going between...

electricity and chemicals and electricity and chemicals, and your brain cells are continually being rebuilt on the run so that after, say, a few months, practically all of the atoms have gone.

and being replaced by other atoms in the same patterns in the same places.

And that raises the question of RUU.

The total amount of current is roughly that a house can draw, about 60 amperes, but instead of being at 240 volts, it's normally at around 80 thousandths of a volt.

So that's a bit of background.

Now, where do you want to go from that, Dr. Alec?