The Bioelectric Code

Your Body Runs on Electricity—And It Matters More Than You Think

Here's something you probably didn't learn in biology class: every cell in your body maintains an electrical voltage across its membrane. Not just neurons—every cell. Your skin cells, your liver cells, your stem cells. They're all tiny batteries, holding a charge that can be measured in millivolts.

For most of the 20th century, biologists ignored this. Bioelectricity was the province of neuroscience and cardiology—action potentials, EKGs, the stuff that obviously runs on electricity. The rest of the body's electrical properties were treated as noise, byproducts, irrelevant to "real" biology.

That's changing. A revolution led by researchers like Michael Levin at Tufts University is revealing that bioelectricity isn't noise—it's signal. Cells use electrical gradients to communicate, to encode positional information, to coordinate growth and form. The patterns of voltage across tissues act as a kind of master control layer, sitting above genes, directing development and regeneration.

The implications are staggering. Cancer may be, in part, a bioelectric disorder. Regeneration—regrowing lost limbs—might be triggered by manipulating voltage patterns. Birth defects could be corrected by tweaking electrical signals. We're discovering a new layer of biological control.

This series explores the bioelectric code—what it is, how it works, and what it means for medicine.

The Series

Your Cells Are Batteries — Every cell maintains a voltage. How this works, and why it matters beyond neurons.

The Voltage of Life: Membrane Potential — Vmem is the resting membrane potential. Its value determines cell fate—proliferation, differentiation, or death.

Ion Channels and Gap Junctions — The molecular hardware that creates and shares electrical signals across tissues.

Morphogenetic Fields: How Bodies Know Their Shape — Voltage patterns encode anatomical information. Change the pattern, change the body plan.

Planarian Regeneration: The Champion Regenerators — Flatworms that regrow entire heads. What they teach us about bioelectric pattern memory.

Cancer as Bioelectric Breakdown — Tumors have abnormal voltage patterns. Is cancer partly an electrical disease?

The Future of Bioelectric Medicine: A Synthesis — From regenerative medicine to cancer treatment, the therapeutic frontier.

The Coherence Frame

The bioelectric code is coherence made electrical. Every cell's voltage is a variable in a distributed computational system. The pattern of voltages across a tissue—what Levin calls the "bioelectric state"—encodes information about what the tissue should become and do.

When the pattern is coherent, development proceeds normally. Organs form in the right places at the right sizes. Wounds heal. Systems maintain themselves.

When the pattern is disrupted, coherence breaks down. Cancer cells have depolarized membranes—they've lost the electrical signature of their tissue identity. Birth defects can arise from disrupted voltage gradients. Failed regeneration may reflect failure to establish the right bioelectric pattern.

The body's electrical properties are a coherence layer—a system-level organizing principle that coordinates cellular behavior across spatial scales. Understanding this layer is understanding something fundamental about how organisms maintain themselves.

Begin with Your Cells Are Batteries, the introduction to your body's electrical nature.