Health - Controversial New Idea: Nerves Transmit Sound, Not Electricity - By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor posted: 14 March, 2007 1:00 pm ET Rendering shows a biological membrane at its melting point. The green molecules are liquid, and the red are solid. Molecules of anesthetic reduce the number of red areas so that the sound pulse can no longer transport its signal. The nerve is anesthetized. Credit: Heiko Seeger, Ph.D. Niels Bohr Institute Nerves transmit sound waves through your body, not electrical pulses, according to a controversial new study that tries to explain the longstanding mystery of how anesthetics work. Textbooks say nerves use electrical impulses to transmit signals from the brain to the point of action, be it to wag a finger or blink an eye. "But for us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation," says Thomas Heimburg, a Copenhagen University researcher whose expertise is in the intersection of biology and physics. "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."
How should I read:
"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." ?
I learned:
If only resistive [being coupled to an electrical resistance] electrical signal transmission takes place, there is dissipation of electric energy in the relevant resistance and hence development of heat.
But also, I learned:
If the signal is purely capacitive [a circuit of ideal capacitors] or inductively [ideal coils], no energy is dissipated.
Under ideal capacitors and inductors current and voltage differ always 90 ° in phase.
Therefore φ = 90 °.
If the current I and the voltage V, then the energy dissipation is always given by: I × V × cosφ
And because cos 90 ° = 0, is also the dissipation 0.
Is "purely capacitive" or "inductively" not the explanation why no such heat is produced?
