this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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No, nerves use cascades of ion potentials. Those are just triggered by touch or electricity.
Ion potentials are electricity... That's the same thing as a voltage measurement: a difference in ion charge between two areas. Open the gate and the charge diffuses. That's a wire.
Edit: poor phrasing with use of the word "wire", I meant in a sense that it's moving electricity, not that it's a conventional solid wire with flowing electrons.
And in nerves it's ion pumps first shoving ions outside and if a trigger occurs, the gate opening, ions flooding in, opening the next gate and so fort. It's not the same.
I'm not arguing that it's the same as a conventional wire, but it is definitely still electricity. Communicating a signal by difference in ionic charge is, by definition, an electric signal, even if it's the movement of ions in a pump instead of electrons across a solid wire.
But it's a cascade of pump triggering the next pump, not electric.