The Body (Electric) Keeps the Score

Learning, Memory, and Cognition in Non-Neural Tissues 🤯

If you’ve been following along here over the last few months, the theme of The Trip Report has been “Emergent Paradigms.” 

I like to think of this ‘season’ of the newsletter as a high-level survey of scientific findings, technologies, novel trends, and newly emerging ways of seeing that will help us understand the shifting landscapes of health and wellbeing and, of course, tie it all back to our main theme: psychedelics.

Hold Everything

I have to tell you about a study I just learned about that is blowing my mind—and perfectly encapsulates this theme we've been running with here: “emergent paradigms.”

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—the origin of the term “scientific paradigm”—author Thomas Kuhn lays out the basic framework for scientific progress, which is predicated on anomalies.

An anomaly refers to a piece of data or evidence that does not fit within the current theoretical framework or expected results as predicted by the dominant scientific paradigm.

Kuhn saw scientific development as cycling between periods of what he calls “normal science” within an accepted paradigm, followed by a crisis brought on by the accumulation of anomalous data, which ultimately leads to revolutionary changes and the adoption of a new paradigm.

Kuhn writes:

“The very existence of an anomaly proves the fallibility of a paradigm. Therefore, a paradigm that explains the anomaly must be incompatible with a paradigm that exposed the anomaly.”

The experiment I am about to tell you about is an anomalous finding relevant to our interest in mental health and well-being, altered states, and consciousness.

But first, a quick look at the current paradigm.

The Neurocentric Paradigm: The Brain Keeps the Score

If you ask any clinician, neuroscientist, or moderately informed layperson, they will tell you that our memories, traits, behavior, personality, trauma, and psychological and emotional conditioning are encoded in the brain.

This is because changes in these qualities show up in brain imaging studies, and people with lesions in certain brain regions display predictable pathological changes.

In other words, “we” are our brains. 

That is, what makes us unique—our personality, character, traits, conditioning, etc.—is encoded in the structure and function of our brains.

For example, when we learn a new language, our brains change to store and retrieve this information.

When we perceive a threat as young children, our brains “remember” the experience in order to protect us against similar situations in the future. 

If this memory leads to maladaptive traits, behaviors, and perceptions, we call it trauma. 

In conversation with Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barret advocated for the neurocentric view when she chided Bessel Van Der Kolk for advancing the idea that the Body Keeps the Score by saying:

“The body doesn’t keep the score. The brain keeps the score; the body is the scorecard.”

Echoing this sentiment in a series for Big Think, she said (emphasis added):

“It’s not your body that needs to heal. It’s your brain’s predictions that need to change. It’s not biologically possible for the body to keep score of anything.”

This mind-body problem has been a debate as old as the hills, but recent anomalous findings point to a new era in mind-body philosophy and science.

The Anomaly: Transmetamorphic Memory

Let me introduce you to Dr. Michael Levin, a developmental and synthetic biologist and computer scientist at Tufts University and the director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology and the Allen Discovery Center.

His work focuses on bioelectricity and its role in regulating development, regeneration, and cancer, among other things.

Levin is the primary investigator in a series of studies that reveal the anomaly.

While not directly related to mental health and psychedelics, his work is important for two reasons:

1. The anomalous findings show that learning, memory, and cognition are encoded in non-neural tissues. 

2. Nearly every culture in humanity’s history has included in its worldview a concept known as “life energy,” “vital force,” “spirit,” and “breath of life.” This includes every culture except the reductive-scientific-materialistic worldview that is dominant in our current age¹.

But let’s get into the anomaly.

The brief version is that when caterpillars—an organism that will undergo metamorphosis and reform as an entirely new organism—are trained to associate feeding with a stimulus (just like Pavlov’s dogs), they retain this learning as butterflies.

That may not seem too jarring at first glance but consider that, during the process, the caterpillar brain is liquified and regrows to accommodate the new anatomy.

Below is the transcript of a 60-second clip from a recent presentation Levin gave (emphasis added and slightly modified for clarity):

“So this is a caterpillar, it lives in a two-dimensional world of crawling on flat surfaces and has a certain kind of brain appropriate to it and it eats leaves. 

This caterpillar is a soft body construction. It needs to turn into something quite different, which is this hard body machine that flies around, drinks nectar, and has all sorts of different behaviors and lives in the three-dimensional world. 

In order to get from here to here, this creature basically deconstructs its brain. This brain is taken apart, most of the cells are killed off, the connections are broken, it creates a new brain that's suitable for driving this kind of body [butterfly]. 

Something very, very critical here is that it's been found…that caterpillars that are trained to associate feeding with a specific stimulus that memory persists [as a butterfly].”

The caterpillar’s brain—the anatomy the current neurocentric paradigm purports to encode and store learned behavior—is liquified (synaptic connections are broken, and dendrites are pruned) and reforms to fit the new anatomy with new neural connections and structure—and yet—the memory of this learned behavior persists.

In other words, the memories remain intact even when the supposed biological hardware within which experiences are stored is liquified and rebuilt.

So, if learning, memory, and behavior aren’t the exclusive province of the brain, what else could be happening?

The Body (Electric) Keeps the Score

In 1985, an orthopedic surgeon turned researcher named Robert O. Becker published The Body Electric: Electromagnetism And The Foundation Of Life, which can be read as either the account of a scientific pioneer or, as a New York Times reviewer called it, “a case for a new vitalism.”

Even before Becker’s work, the association with “vital essence” or “life force” has made the field of bioelectricity rife with controversy.

In Electromagnetism & Life, Becker notes:

“Bio-philosophy has been the battleground for the two most antagonistic and long-lived scientific philosophies—mechanism and vitalism. 

Anyone who aspired to a career in the medical or biological sciences was well advised to hesitate before publicly proposing that electromagnetic forces had any effect on living things, other than to produce shock or heating of the tissues, or that such forces played any sort of functional role in living things.”

The Body Electric, however, inspired a young Michael Levin, who decided to dedicate his scientific career to continuing Becker's work in bioelectricity.

When challenged with the idea that the only bodily electricity that matters is the neuronal action potential, here’s how Levin put the matter in a 2021 piece in Nautilus Magazine:

“There are very few fundamental differences between neural networks and other tissues of bioelectrically communicating cells…

If you think that consciousness in the brain is somehow a consequence of the brain’s electrical activity, then there’s no principled reason to assume that non-neural electric networks won’t underlie some primitive, basal (ancient) form of nonverbal consciousness.”

But what about the caterpillars? How do they retain learning if their brains are liquified and recast?

Here’s how Levin and co-authors put it in a paper titled The Stability of Memories During Brain Remodeling: A Perspective:

“It is likely that although memory is encoded through synaptic plasticity and recalled by activation of the neural network, there is a “blueprint” of the memories that may be kept safely in place by a mechanism other than the synaptic connections themselves…

Indeed, all of the major mechanisms by which nerves function – ion channels, neurotransmitters, and electrical synapses not only exist throughout the body but are now known to be functional drivers of many patterning events during regenerative and developmental pattern regulation.

If indeed memory and information processing rely on labile connections within a rich network of signaling activity, it becomes immediately clear that the CNS is not the only game in town.”

According to Levin, the other game in town is bioelectricity—the electromagnetic signaling that exists in every cell in the body, not just the brain and nervous system.

1. Is bioelectricity, a documented and replicated finding associated with morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer metabolism, the elusive substrate of this traditional worldview? That is a question for another time.