Michael Levin

And so it was already, even bacterial biofilms, there's some beautiful work from UCSD on brain-like dynamics and bacterial biofilms.

So evolution figured out very early on that electrical networks are amazing at having memories, at integrating information across distance, at different kinds of optimization tasks, image recognition, and so on.

long before there were brains.

Yeah.

So I want to make sure and kind of give credit where credit is due.

So as far back as 1903 and probably late 1800s already, people were thinking about the importance of electrical phenomena in life.

So I'm for sure not the first person to stress the importance of electricity.

There were waves of research in the 30s, in the 40s, and then

Again, in the kind of 70s, 80s and 90s of sort of the pioneers of bioelectricity who did some amazing work on all this.

I think what we've done that's new is to step away from this idea that, and I'll describe what the bioelectricity is, is step away from the idea that, well, here's another piece of physics that you need to keep track of to understand bioelectricity.

physiology and development and to really start looking at this as saying no this is a a privileged computational layer that gives you access to the actual cognition of the tissue of basal cognition so so merging that that developmental biophysics with ideas and cognition of computation and so on i think i think that's what we've done that's new but people have been talking about bioelectricity for a really long time and and so i'll so i'll define that so

What happens is that if you have a single cell, cell has a membrane, in that membrane are proteins called ion channels, and those proteins allow charged molecules, potassium, sodium, chloride, to go in and out under certain circumstances.

And when there's an imbalance of those ions, there becomes a voltage gradient across that membrane.

And so all cells, all living cells, try to hold a particular kind of voltage difference across the membrane, and they spend a lot of energy to do so.

When you now, so that's a single cell.

When you have multiple cells, the cells sitting next to each other, they can communicate their voltage state to each other via a number of different ways.

But one of them is this thing called a gap junction, which is basically like a little submarine hatch that just kind of docks, right?

And the ions from one side can flow to the other side and vice versa.

Correct.

This had to be evolved.