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Chapter Eleven
The Shocking Truths About Electrobiology

There was this student in my electronics lab at college. In those days electronics was the study of vacuum tubes, with voltages ranging from 150-750 volts DC. This student was less than cautious around the lab experiments and would often brush his arm or hand onto one of these voltages. There would be a yelp, and the rest of us would know he’d done it to himself again.

He got so he could tell by the shock he received what the voltage was. “That was 350 volts.” he’d say as he rubbed his hand. We d measure, and sure enough, he’d be within 50 volts of the right voltage. He certainly earned his title, “the Human Voltmeter.” a.k.a. “The Stupid Klutz.”

Let’s talk a little bit more about electricity and how it interacts with biological systems – cells, nerves, muscles and stuff. This is really important in order to understand electrical play. This is also where things get interesting.

For understanding electrical play you’ll need some useful models about how electricity operates in biological material.

The important thing to remember about biological systems and their components – cells – is that they basically consist of something like salt water – even the very important epidermis cells of the skin, except of course this fluid is almost dried out. Our bodies are made up mostly of this water. The thing you’ll remember about salt water from our previous discussions is that it is an electrical conductor.

Now, as we have seen, it is important to remember that biological systems are more than just salt water, and we have to study these other aspects to understand electrical play. But right now let’s take a look at how electricity affects pure water and salt water to build up an accurate model of our cells.

The Effect of Electricity on Water and Other Insulators

Some of you may have heard that water is an insulator – at least pure water. This is true, sort of.

If you throw a flashlight battery into pure water, it will not short out or even have any current flowing from the positive (+) to the negative (-) pole. It’ll be wet, of course. That’s why we say water is an insulator.

First we should review what an insulator is (see Chapter 2). An (electrical) insulator is a material through which no (or very, very little) current flows when you apply a voltage across it. We can say that such a material has a very high resistance – generally 10 million ohms or more. Pure water, glass, paper, wood, insulation on electrical wires, many plastics, and many other things are considered good insulators.

Water, as most people know from chemistry, is a molecule composed of one atom of oxygen (O) and two atoms of hydrogen (H) or H₂O. The way these atoms arrange themselves in the molecule is that the two hydrogen atoms tend to be on one side of the water molecule. If you look at a cock and two balls you get a good model of a water molecule (see fig. 29). The cock (doesn’t matter if it’s flaccid or erect) is the oxygen atom and the two balls are the hydrogen atoms. In this arrangement the “balls’’ (hydrogen atoms) of the molecule have more of a positive (+) charge on that side of the molecule.

Figure 29: Water

Water is a very stable molecule. There are no excess electrons or ions which can be the “stuff” that can move as a current. So if you take a DC voltage (say from a battery) and put the positive (+) wire into some pure water and the negative (-) wire a little away into the same water, you will read 0 amps flowing. You’d see the same thing happen with AC too.

What happens to the molecules, though, is that all the little “cocks” of the molecule tend to point to the battery’s positive (+) wire and the “balls” of the molecule tend to point to the negative (-) wire. However, because molecules are not as free to move as easily as electrons, no current can flow. Some water molecules do break down, just like the air molecules we studied in Chapter 6 on high voltage. With a high enough voltage, of course, enough water molecules can break down to become a whole other story.

With an AC voltage from your household outlet in place of the battery, the wires alternate (+) to (-) as the voltage alternates. The water molecules in this case still don’t rush back and forth between one wire or the other (they’re still not free to move), but the little “cocks” and “balls” of the molecule do tend to follow the alternations. This is a very small mechanical movement of a large molecule, not the “stuff” of current.

When you apply electricity with certain frequencies across water – including the water inside a human body – the water heats up.

What is interesting is that when you apply an AC voltage or an electrical field with a high enough frequency across water, the mechanical rotation of the water molecules trying to follow the alternating +’s and -’s of the voltage produces heat in the water. This is why high frequency radio waves can heat up the inside of a human body – which has a large amount of water in it. It is also the principle of the diathermy machine, which is sometimes used in electrical play, or of the microwave oven, which should never be used in electrical play (unless you want to heat up some cold coffee for yourself).

A very similar analysis applies for other insulators as well. Here, however, you have many variations in heating effects and molecular motion.

The Effect of Electricity on Salt Water

When you add some salt - that’s sodium chloride, NaCl, for you chemistry students – to pure water, an interesting thing happens. The salt, as the chemists say, “disassociates” into sodium ions, which are (+), and chloride ions, which are (-). Ions – atoms with more or fewer electrons than usual – are one of the kinds of “stuff” of which current is made. So when you put a DC or an AC voltage across some salt water, you will see a current flowing. Most of the motion comes from the electrons from the chloride ions, and very little from the ions themselves. How much current is dependent on how many ions are available (and therefore the number of free electrons), i.e., how much salt is in the water (within limits – water can only take so much salt). If you actually measure it with an ohmmeter you’ll read about 2,000 ohms in water with as much salt as it can take. The little “cocks” and “balls” of the water molecule are also trying to follow the voltage, but that’s unimportant in this case.

By adding salt to water, you lower its resistance so current can flow across it. The water inside the human body is salt water.

Since much of our biological systems are made of fluids like salt water, this is an important process to understand. This is particularly true of things like blood, piss, sweat, semen, vaginal fluid, etc. – all of which are freely available and accessible in a human body.

The Effect of Electricity on Biological Material

So far, in developing our understanding of electricity in the body, we’ve looked at the effect of electricity in pure water and then in salt water. Salt water is supposed to be very similar to the fluids inside our bodies. Notice I said “very similar.” Let’s see where the limits of this model are.

We learned (or at least we’re supposed to have learned) from Chapter 9 that cells are made up of more than just the fluids that are inside and outside them. Also there are many cell parts that are inside the cells that are not similar to salt water. Remember?

The thing is that these non-salt-water-like parts of the cells are neither all conductors nor all insulators. Some are more like conductors. Others are more like insulators.

The cell membrane, for example, is designed to let fluids from outside the cell flow into the cell and vice-versa under certain conditions. Cell membranes are also complex chemical molecules that can be pierced, attacked, and destroyed. One of the things that can destroy cell membranes is too much electrical current.

The best example to look at here is the weenie. No, I’m not talking about someone’s cock (although if you have consensual permission to try this on somebody’s cock, be my guest – even though you’d be into real serious kink). I’m talking here about a hot dog.

A hot dog is made of meat – muscle and other animal cells. (I won’t get into an argument here about what else it contains or the quality of it.) I can measure the resistance of the hot dog with an ohmmeter. An ohmmeter has a battery that sends a small current through the resistor (hot dog). This small current is really the electrons that are free to move and some ions that are in the fluids inside and outside the cells. The cell walls in the meat really don’t impede this current a lot. When I measure the hot dog. I’ll read about 2,000 ohms – the same as salt water.

However, if I raise the voltage, thereby sending more current through the hot dog, something different happens. This higher current still flows through the fluids and cells of the meat, but it is also high enough to start breaking down the cell membranes and even breaking down the fluids (which if you remember are only similar to salt water, not exactly salt water). Now you have something different than an electrical current going through salt water – you may even have a resistance that is less than that of salt water.

High voltages can break down the cells in human flesh, thus lowering its resistance even further. The broken-down cells carry current and heat up even better than salt water.

Another thing also happens. You’ll notice that the hot dog starts getting hot. It gets so hot that it can get fully cooked in a matter of minutes.

What happens to your hot dog can happen to your weenie, or to any part of the inside or even the skin of your body when you have a high enough voltage to start breaking down the cells and the fluids of the body. Severe burns are the result of too much current flowing through the body. You can produce such burns by applying a high voltage in a circuit which contains both a body part and the epidermis trying to protect it (yes, a high enough voltage can burn through the epidermis), or a lower voltage if you get under the epidermis or if resistance is reduced in some other way. Think electric chair. In reality, an electric chair is just like an electric hot dog cooker. It may also be something to think about as you’re strapped into one as a result of playing carelessly with electricity.

Burns are just one of the results of electrical accidents where too much current is involved. You can also have trouble with lower currents (you’ll see a chart about this next chapter).

When we studied nerve cells in Chapter 9, we saw that enough stimulation by electricity to enough nerves can cause intense pain to the recipient. Since muscles are commanded to move by electrical nerve signals, enough current can not only move the muscles but also cause them to cramp up. The heart also being a muscle – and a very important one at that – is especially sensitive to stray electric currents.

We need to now take a look more closely at what happens to current inside the body.

A More Detailed Look at Currents Inside the Body

Let’s do another “thought experiment.” If you took a flashlight battery – 1.5 volts – and placed it in your hand, you would feel nothing except the weight of the battery. The air around the battery is a good insulator so almost no current would flow – maybe 0.01 to 2 microamps (µa).

If I took the same battery and dropped it into a bucket of pure water, what would happen? Well, we know from this chapter that pure water is much like an insulator if the voltage is not too high. You would expect that the battery would act just like it would in air, i.e., hardly any current would flow.

Think of taking the same battery and throwing it into a bucket of very salty water. Now also in this chapter we’ve seen that salt water is a conductor of electric current and why that’s so. What you would see is that the battery would draw so much current that it might even get hot enough to explode. No surprises here, even if this isn’t what scientists mean when they talk about the “Big Bang.”

But now we need to take a closer look at what a “conductor” means. If the salt water were a copper wire, we could easily imagine all of the current being totally confined within the wire. However, in our thought experiment the salt water totally surrounds the battery (see fig. 30). What confines the current now? What paths can all those electrons and ions that are part of current take? Where can you expect to see the current?

Figure 30: Battery in salt water

Remember my talking about current density in Chapter 2? There I used a block of carbon as the conductor in question. The current in the carbon block has many paths to travel, and we can imagine a model of a lattice connection of resistances that allows us to use Ohm’s and Kirchhoff s Laws to calculate the current and current density through the carbon block. What we would calculate we’d actually be able to measure.

What happens in the carbon block is the same thing that happens in the salt water thought experiment. There are many current paths available (see fig. 30). But. let’s say that we dropped the battery – or better yet a high voltage power line – into the ocean.

That’s salt water too. If we did this in the Pacific near San Francisco, would a swimmer in Sydney harbor in Australia get electrocuted?

The answer is no. This is fortunate because undersea high voltage power lines break in the ocean all the time. Only fish and people near the break get electrocuted. People and fish far away don’t. (See Appendix 2 for a more detailed discussion of this question.)

We saw in Chapter 3 that current divides itself among the resistances according to the resistances. The higher the resistance in a parallel circuit, the lower the current. The lower the resistance the higher the current. This is Ohm’s Law. The current will in essence take the easier path, but it can also take other paths. Most of the current will concentrate in the easiest path (the lowest resistance). The harder the path (higher resistances), the less the current. Another way of saying this is that electricity will take an easy path of a 1/4 inch to avoid a hard path of 100 miles. Yay science!

However, the human body is not all that huge. We’ve seen that we can think of the inside of the body (under the epidermis) as salt water. Here the terms “near” and “far away” have life-affecting importance. This is often the crux of the debate between people who say “Never play with electricity above the waist,” and those who want to do electrical play across the nipples.

The closer an object (like the heart) is to the path of a current, the more likely it is to be affected by the current.

The heart is the most sensitive part of a human body to electrical play. In some cases as little as I microamp applied directly to the heart can cause it to start misfiring (ventricular fibrillation). If I use a TENS unit across someone’s feet, what will the current from that TENS unit be at the location of the heart? What about if I use a TENS unit across the genitals? What if I used a cattle prod (higher voltage) instead of a TENS unit? Where is it safe to play with electricity and where is it not safe? Where’s my mommy? (Ooops, sorry!)

The simple answer to these questions is that there is no simple answer to these questions. Very little scientific study has been done about electrical play – particularly about currents inside the body. (Although, as I’ve said before, if somebody wants to spend several million to fund one and I can get some cute volunteers, I’d be willing to try.) There is no exact or calculable answer to these questions.

So we can make some deductions based on the battery in salt water thought experiment, but it doesn’t give exact answers for the body. The resistances inside the body may not be uniform throughout the body. The 100 or 2,000 ohms is a reasonable approximation (100 ohms as a very conservative estimate, 2000 ohms as a level you’re actually likely to measure). The heart’s main pacemaker usually regulates heart rhythms. The heart is also regulated by chemicals in the bloodstream. Maybe the current through the heart is safe, but the bottom can still go into cardiac arrest if the play is too frightening and too much adrenaline is secreted.

What we do have is observations that some people do play with electricity across the nipples with apparently no or little harm to the heart. But we don’t know if ‘‘some’’ is “all,” and we don’t know if “all” instances have been reported. Maybe in Wrenched Knee. Kansas, there is one bottom who wasn’t lucky, and the top hasn’t been caught yet.

Until someone is willing to give me the several million dollars for the study to answer the question, perhaps the better questions to ask are those I’ve suggested in Chapter 10, during your negotiation.

In the next chapter, we’ll examine some more aspects of how the body reacts to electricity.