I don't want to hear it again--cell phone waves are harmful to your brain...stick your face close enough for long enough and you'll turn to mush. But, there's a new paper out there that I'm afraid might catch on as fodder for the pseudoscience susceptible.
[Just cool animation. Not part of the study.]
Scientists at Caltech recently found that weak electrical fields in the brain might cause neurons to fire in sync. It's really kinda neat. Researchers dropped a cluster of minuscule electrodes into a tiny mass of brain tissue and measured the local electric fields that were hanging around while neurons were firing. The thing is--they'd always known that electric fields resulted from neurons firing--neuroscientists have been measuring alpha and delta brain waves for decades, that's how we know someone's asleep or awake. But with this study, they found that electric fields also cause neuron firing.
The theory is that the brain might need to synchronize it's neurons during complex cognitive functions like memory formation and electric fields help this to happen. There's no telling where or how all this is organized.
So why wouldn't an external electric field like a cell phone or microwave affect our brain synchronization and therefore interfere with some complex brain processes like remembering? As explained well by others, cell phone's ionizing radiation energy is too small to cause cancer. But, a cell phone's electric field strength is 51 volts/m and the brain's electric fields run from about 2-3 volts/m in strength to 100 volts/m (during seizure.) Physics says it's possible that these outside fields affect our brain's internal fields--but wait.
Anyone who knows how science works knows that even though this paper was published in Nature Neuroscience, we should wait until others chime in with their theories of what's going on. I'm gonna say it--this is a very preliminary study. When you hear that, you should not think--well, By George! this is the first person to prove what others will prove for decades to come--you should instead think--ok, i wonder who else has a theory of what's going on here.
And, I do wonder. I wonder how the vicious cycle between firing neuron and electric field begins and how it's directed to the part of the brain that needs to be used. I wonder whether brain electric fields are reinforced by some internal brain process that might not allow for much interference from the outside. And, I wonder how you can exclude outside electric fields during the experiment itself.
And now that I've told you what to think, you hate me. But, at least we've learned a little something about new research together. Or maybe you stopped reading right before the bolded 'but wait' in which case I question whether I should have written this post in the first place.
Anastassiou CA, Perin R, Markram H, & Koch C (2011). Ephaptic coupling of cortical neurons. Nature neuroscience, 14 (2), 217-23 PMID: 21240273
I wouldn't say that holding your head close enough to a cell phone for long enough would turn your brain to mush. There probably is side effects such as headaches, nausea, vertigo, etc. that aren't researched. The only real danger associated with cell phones is the actual antennas on the tower. The little antenna in your cell phone transmits and receives only a fraction of the radiation that the tower's antennas do. We are subjected to more ambient radiation in our day to day lives just walking around or staring at a computer screen blogging than we are by making a call.
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Good point. But, it might be impossible to test for effects like headaches and nausea, to separate the effect of cell phone signals from the effect of everyday life. So, for now we have to acknowledge that there is still no reproducible study that causally links cell phones signals to human ailments.
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