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Scientists Say Nerves Use Sound, Not Electricity
gazzarda writes "The CBC is reporting that a team of Danish scientists are claiming that nerve impulses are transmitted by sound and not electricity. 'The common view that nerves transmit impulses through electricity is wrong and that they really transmit sound, according to a team of Danish scientists. The Copenhagen University researchers argue that biology and medical textbooks that say nerves relay electrical impulses from the brain to the rest of the body are incorrect.'"
...its really the sound of the tazer that is making your muscles contract in all kinds of ways and you losing motor control, not the hundreds of thousands of volts coursing through your body.
Wow... who would of guessed it!
einstein
http://anarchy-tv.com/
As a neuroscientist who has a healthy respect for a little anarchy from time to time, I have to call shenanigans on this one. I'd love to kick down the doors on some fundamentally held beliefs (my dissertation did something close to that), but this had me laughing out loud.
I've recorded from nerve cells in the classical manner and run the parametrics on different ionic concentrations and it would take quite a solid argument backed up by data for me to displace any of the credibility built on the classic Hodgkin and Huxley work.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Maybe, but it sure explains how my mother-in-law gets on my damn nerves every time she opens her mouth.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I am currently in an Intro to Neuroscience class atm, but this sounds a bit...off. I am, obviously, not a scientist, but it seems to me that 1.)neurons and their associated structures do not have the physiological equipment necessary to produce sound, and 2.)Considering that the vast majority of passive and active scanning procedures specifically monitor or stimulate electrical activity in the brain, this seems a wee bit kooky. But, as stated, I ain't a scientist. Sage wisdom, folks?
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
Is it just me, or did the summary say the same thing in three slightly different ways?
Other scientists say, "These scientists are idiots."
I'm so tired of hearing the press use "scientists say" as a legitimizing opener. If you believe something because "scientists" say so, you are probably not a scientist. If you were, you would be forced to know many scientists who are idiots; scientists who no one should listen to.
Peer reviewed and agreed upon usually means good science. The CBC saying, "scientists say" means squatcum.
How do they explain all of the electrical measurements of nerve cells? We have measured voltages and currents. We know that these are dependent on certain protein channels, and salt concentrations. If impulses are actually the result of "solitons", how can they explain half a century worth of neurobiology? One wild guess, based on a minor inconsistency (if it even exists as they believe) needs a hell of a lot more evidence before they should be taken seriously.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Time to replace all your tinfoil helmets with a pair of ear plugs.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
"Hey - will you guys quiet down? I can barely hear myself think!"
Ryan Fenton
On further review, it seems that the CBC article is total crap, but that the original paper isn't that far off the deep end. I admit that I don't know enough to really follow or critique the research, but it doesn't seem to be the crackpot theory that TFA implies. Nowhere, for example, does that paper say that nerves don't use electricity. In fact, the paper refers to "solitons" as a piezo-electric effect. They are merely proposing a new mechanism on top of previous theories, not trying to completely throw out all neuroscience to date.
To recap: Completely bogus headline, based on a completely bogus bit of popular science reporting, which itself is based on a possibly intriguing (but tentative) bit of original research. Nothing to see here.
It's a series of tubes.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Every cell in your body is encapsulated by a cell membrane that is essentially two layers of lipids. It's not a real revelation that many drugs' effectiveness is enhanced by lipid-solubility.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
What happens when you play those nerves backwards?
You turn into Ozzy Osbourne?
... I dance like an idiot to loud German trance music.
It's not because I'm drunk, It's involuntary movements caused by the sound, Some "scientists" said so!
God Be Gone
Imagine all the possibilities! You could make someone do something just by yelling at them loud enough!!
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Does this mean that the next time someone kicks me in the nads all I need are earplugs for the pain to go away?
I don't think I will test that theory, I'll let someone else do it.
"This is America... where the will of the few outweigh the outrage of the many..." - Unknown
Rephrasing the same statement three times is actually not the same thing as elaborating on it. Repeating something three times dos not provide more information. It's wrong to think that stating something three times over will make for a better summary.
sic transit gloria mundi
To illustrate, his most compelling argument is this: "The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced."
This was when I thought he was full of shit. Any type of 'communication' requires some energy. The transduction of sound (molecules hitting one another in a propagating a pressure wave) also could produce heat in the thermodynamic argument. TFA is lacking on sufficient detail to look into this further.
The conduction of nerve impulses is understood at a detailed molecular level. There are numerous experiments that have observed everything from individual charges and ions traveling through channels and careful electrical modeling, to rationally designed anaesthetics that interact with specific molecules and targeted modifications of channels.
Now, it's always a good idea to keep an open mind. But these people have presented no even remotely interesting evidence that we need a change in paradigms. They are simply nuts.
...can we say officially that this part of slashdot has become a FANSCOS now (First Annual NeuroScientist Convention On Slashdot) ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
First, the Biophysical Journal is fairly respectable, and a much more appropriate place to publish work in this area. Second, the actual journal article in the Biophysical Journal does NOT say what the Slashdot and CBC titles say, so judging them on this basis is inappropriate. The article is an extension of a previously published model which shows that nerve signal propagation can be described as 100m/s piezo-electric soliton pulses, and it shows that these are dependent upon the phase transition temperatures for membranes.
My brain actually listens to what I see? How confusing...
Insightful gives karma, funny doesn't.
If sound propagated down a nerve by sound, it'd end there. There's no mechanism to produce sound when a neurotransmitter from the first nerve mated with a receptor on the next.
Also, we listen to brain waves with an EEG or MEG, which measure minute electrical or magnetic impulses. We do not use a microphone and amplifier. Plus, we induce currents with electricity and magnetism, not loudspeakers, and produce predictable results.
Sound waves of sufficient intensity to propagate the full length of a nerve would be so strong in the main trunk that they'd disrupt the transport mechanism carrying neurotransmitters down from the cell body. They'd isloate the nerve from participating in the local neural network.
A new theory should explain everything just as well as the old plus more. This one falls apart at the basics and can't handle some of the nuances.
If sound propagation were the key, all that sodium and potassium gating to change the local membrane charge would be useless, and nature hates that kind of waste.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Just looking at the transmission speeds makes it clear what is going here:
Data:
Summary: neural transmission is orders of magnitude too slow to qualify as either an electrical or sonic phenomenon.
Conclusion: TFA suggests replacing one gross oversimplification of neural transmission with another. Neural transmission might have some qualities of both but is clearly neither. TFA is garbage.
Note Bene:There is no way of knowing what the original work was talking about. I cannot imagine anyone who has studied neural transmissions saying anything like TFA's contents. I suspect that the author of TFA was presented with an anology and took it for fact.
Slashdot needs a way to "thumbs down" stupid articles so they disappear.