Connectionists: An Electrodynamic Theory of Biology

[Patirniche, Dinu]

Dear Colleagues,

What is a meter?

If you say a unit length, you are correct. However, the meter is not 
just any unit of length, but one that is relevant for you as a human. 
Mature humans are around 1.70m high, and walk comfortably at 1m/s. But 
why do we use the meter at all, when it comes to expressing events and 
distances encountered in the brain?

A commonly held biophysical dogma says that magnetic interactions 
occurring among neighboring compartments of biological tissues, such as 
for example the different neurons in a brain, can be ignored. The 
typical argument used to give credit to all biophysical theories rooted 
in electrostatic is related to the observation that the vast majority of 
all electrical events within living tissues propagate are incredibly low 
speeds. Thus, since action potentials (APs), that is, sharp fluctuations 
of the electric field, are seen to propagate at speeds between 1 and 100 
m/s, any dynamic induction phenomena arising due to the presence of such 
an event is apriorily excluded. And indeed, with meter-long sensors 
there is hardly any significant electrodynamics signals to be recorded.

However, acknowledging that the AP is playing a decisive role in the 
chemical transmission cycle, we could express the AP's speed in units 
that are relevant to this process. Since the dendritic spine is an 
integral part of the chemical transmission machinery, we could introduce 
a new unit of length and call it the "dendritic-spine-head" to mean 1 
micro-meter, or 10^-6 m. Thus, referring to the spine as an observer of 
the AP, this event propagates at 1,000,000 "dendritic-spine-heads"/s. 
 From the perspective of a spine, the production of such an event is 
anything but a stationary phenomenon, appearing necessary to consider 
what an electrodynamic theory might say about the interactions between 
an incoming electrical pulse and a fixed spine.

In following this route, I came to the conclusion that all biological 
organisms can be easily decomposed into a finite set of disjoint, and 
electrically insulated volumes, that appear to function as a set of 
nested highly-exotic electromagnetic antennae. If this view can be 
maintained, understanding brains as room-temperature quantum computers, 
and life as a globally coherent state within some finite reach, is 
inevitable.

I present this theory in a preprint entitled Dynamic Aspects of Finite 
Architectures (http://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.20815.79527), and invite 
you to read, comment and share this manuscript.


Best regards,
Dinu Patirniche.