TED
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 12 months, 2021–2026
19:41 · 576K views · Mar 31, 2021
Biologist Michael Levin explains the bioelectric layer that coordinates cells to build organs and bodies, showing footage of two-headed worms and introducing xenobots. He discusses implications for medicine and the nature of life.
HN commenters use it as the accessible 20-minute entry point to Levin's bioelectricity research whenever regeneration or cell signaling comes up.
13 comments from Hacker News
your cells are sensitive to charge in general - cells attempt to maintain certain voltage differentials across their membranes via ion channels in the cell membrane, can communicate voltage information with each other via gap junctions, etc. That electrical communication does control how cells behave. If you have 20 minutes to watch this ted talk interview I highly recommend it. My mind was blown. Your DNA determines the hardware, but there's a lot of non chemical communication that goes on between cells that determine how they behave. this video Once you realize that cells can effectively communicate with each other via voltage, things like whats described about electrical bandages become less surprising.
Electric potential across other cells and also single-cell organisms is well known and not new. This is new though (and revolutionary): this video Regarding consciousness, I don't get why people who submit to consciousness being everywhere in the universe have problem with simply calling it the universe. It seems to make discussions much more productive.
One interesting research group tackling this question is ex-computer engineer, currently biologist Prof. Micahel Levine's group. They built xenobots (biological robots) from frog cells which are not evolutionarily programmed to do tasks which they accomplished. Their research in part deals with emergence of agency at multi-cellular level. And they want to get at the fundamental signatures of what makes some collection of agents into a new single agent at an higher level. Checkout, this video And a new research paper (inhavent had the time to read yet) on this question of how coherent higher order agents emerge from underlying sub-agents. [LINK]
Regarding how the body "knows" how to form missing pieces, might be worth checking out Michael Levin's research regarding bio-electricity. Most interesting finding to me is that once modified, the animal bodies continue to produce different parts as if there is some electrical "memory" in the cells. Here is an overview video: this video , though there are much longer lectures and papers which I would recommend if you are interested.
There's a fascinating (in my opinion) TED talk about this featuring the same Biologist, with examples of regenerative experiments performed using Flatworms: this video