[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

I was doing some research into the electrical properties of humans and I found out that the entire body acts like a "piezoelectric crystal"

http://www.maintainmassage.co.nz/2010/06/massage-therapy-and-piezoelectricity/

According to the article, massaging the skin makes the body produce electricity. Bizarre 0.o   Now what I'm wondering is can you do the effect in reverse? can you apply electricity to the skin and get it to vibrate via the piezoelectric effect.

I know that when muscles are electrocuted they retract and Charley-horse out. But the epi/dermis (skin) doesn't do that, apparently it should vibrate. A long time a go I put my hand on a live tesla coil to experience the skin effect (lightning powers) Basically I passed 50,000 volts Around my body, In the end I was unharmed BUT I noticed a tingling sensation which I hadn't really focused on until now.

Was that sensation made because of my skin's piezoelectric properties? Was my liquid crystal skin vibrating via piezoelectric stimulation? I have also found that tapping in to the bodies piezoelectric properties has profound health benefits. I found that medical piezo-stimuli helped in making people more fertile, stimulates cologen in the skin and helps bones heal as well as a whole host of other applications.

[RD]

Dry bone is piezoelectric ... http://silver.neep.wisc.edu/~lakes/BoneElectr.html

[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

RD
I Wonder what It means, what is it for? In life there is no form without function. What can we do to tap into the power of the liquid crystal aspect of the human body? Can you put electricity into a person in some special way to make a person vibrate? How can this be useful in any way.

[evan_au]

Many cells in the body are sensitive to electric fields - and not just nerves, which use electric fields to conduct nerve impulses.
Electric fields help move ions in and out of cells, and, on a smaller scale, fold proteins into the right shape, lock enzymes onto their targets and cause chemical reactions to happen.

The structure of bone is being continually being remodeled by osteoblasts and osteoclasts to take into account the varying stresses which are experienced in life.

It has been claimed that some bone fractures that do not heal well have been helped by a small electric or magnetic field, so perhaps piezo electricity in bone provides some information on the location of stress and strain, which directs the operation of this bone remodelling?

Some claimed therapeutic applications of electric fields: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrotherapy

[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

i already know the effects of electo-theropy but that sort of thing doesn't exactly have anything to do with piezo-electricity except for the possibility that the effect might help heal bones.

Take this for example, the Nikola Tesla skin effect, a long time ago people thought that it could help heal you in a variety of ways. time passed and science looked at the matter a little closer and it was discovered that the calmed health effects were just myth now it's just a curiosity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_wand


but what your telling me is that the electric field of the skin effect could actually be useful for healing? how? You said that the human body is more electrical then we think could the skin effect's electric field be more then myth?

what would happen if I used the skin effect all day every day for a year. what sort of health benefits or ill effects would I experience? If I broke my leg wile doing this would my bones heal faster? Or what if I got sick while doing this would my cells react better or what? I know For a fact that If you hold a piezoelectric crystal while skin effecting it will vibrate or make noise depending on the crystal in hand.

I should add That the skin effect is just an example of a way to energize the body with an electric field. What if I remained electrically charged via static what whould be the effects of that?

[evan_au]

The structure of cell membranes are one form of liquid crystal, with a thin fat-soluble layer surrounded by water on both sides.
This also applies to animal and bacterial cells.

But it's not clear what you would want to do with this?  It's very different from a liquid crystal display.

Please clarify the connection that you are investigating with piezoelectricity...

[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

Your right, I unintentionally misused the term "liquid crystals" It would have been better to say that the human body is a liquid piezoelectric crystal, referring to the piezoelectric properties of various cells in the various fluids in the body. Real "liquid crystals" which are used in screens has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. (so sorry about that confusion)

As far as what I intend to do with this knowledge is still not clear even to me.  All I know is that the human body has piezoelectric properties WHAT I want to know is why. Why does the human body posses these properties? How can you tap into it's power?

From the articles I've read it appears to have tremendous healing effects. For example, piezoelectricity helps bones heal, what if you could supply a small current through the bone, would in help the bone heal faster? It's stuff like that which im interested in.

[danielappacheco]

Hi,

the piezoelectric property is one of the most interesting and unknown features of the world. However, it is present on the electronic compartments of everyday equipment. 

Despite this, it has been described that it is also present in the human body.

First of all, what means piezoelectric? Piezoelectricity implies that one an object is electrical stimulated it will generate MICROdeformations. However, when mechanical stimulated an electrical current is also generated.

Second, it is present in almost every single organ of your body, but not all of them. Almost all biological matter, including DNA, collagen, keratin, and enamel possess piezoelectricity. Once this proteins belong to the extracellular matrix of almost every organ bone, skin, among other organs also manifest this property?

So, why living tissues need it and why it is manifested?

This phenomenon arises from the fact that almost all proteins present in the human body present a crystalline structure which is the main requisite to the piezoelectric phenomenon.

In 1967, Morris Shamos and Leroy Lavine postulated that piezoelectricity is a “fundamental property” on biological tissues, since it may play a significant role in several physiological phenomena. This is easily observed on lifters!! If you check the bone mass present on their legs is higher than a common person! But why?? It has been hypothesized that once they subject the bone of the legs to mechanical stimuli and due to the bone' piezoelectricity, collagen reorganizes its dipole and shows negative charges on the surface, which induces charged amino acids to promote electrostatic interaction with calcium and phosphate ions, only in areas of the bone that is subjected to compression forces.
However, in the moon the bone mass is decreased once the bone is not submitted to compression forces.

Hope it helps (:

Shamos M, Lavine L. 1967; Piezoelectricity as a fundamental property of biological tissues. Nature 213: 267 – 269.

[kiwi]

Some 50 years ago I interviewed Dr. James Ferguson, a pioneer in Liquid Crystal research at Kent State.

He postulated that the speed of transmission via liquid crystals matched the speed of nerve impulses far better than any electrical signal-type proposal.

Has this ever been confirmed?

[evan_au]

speed of transmission via liquid crystals matched the speed of nerve impulses far better than any electrical signal

• Nerve impulses travel at 0.5 - 120 m/s, and rely on the physical movement of Calcium & Potassium ions across a nerve cell membrane, transverse to the direction of propagation.
  
• Electrical signals in wires travel about 200,000,000 m/s, and relies on the physical movement of electrons in a metal, in the direction of propagation. This is clearly much faster than nerve impulses.

Optical changes in liquid crystals rely on the physical movement of molecules, so I imagine the speed of this action would be closer to nerve impulses than to electrical signals in a wire.

But seriously, I don't understand how you would define or measure the "speed" of a liquid crystal in m/s, or why there would be some sort of race between nerve impulses and liquid crystals...

[evan_au]

the human body is a liquid piezoelectric crystal

Piezoelectric substances are usually insulators, with charged atoms in fixed positions within their regular crystal structure. When you physically deform them, the electric charges in the substance are displaced in a regular manner, and so an overall electric charge appears at the surface. With suitable electrodes and circuitry you can collect some of this charge, and accumulate it to do some useful work - like make a spark in a piezoelectric gas lighter, or produce an audio voltage in the old-fashioned piezoelectric microphones or the slightly more modern hydrophones.

However, if you surround the piezoelectric substance by a conductive fluid, any charge separation appearing on the surface will be "shorted out" by the surrounding fluid. The human body is filled with a salty, conductive fluid, so you can't really generate useful electricity in this way (it will be shorted out). However, if the cells embedded in bone were sensitive to electricity, they could use piezoelectricity as some sort of signal (bone is a solid piezoelectric substance).

Almost all biological matter, including DNA, collagen, keratin, and enamel possess piezoelectricity.

I agree that many organic substances like amino acids and proteins have a charge separation within the molecule. If the molecule changes shape, these charges will change position, and there will be a local change in the charge separation, on the scale of one molecule.

• Its not easy to compress a large number of proteins floating with random orientations in a fluid, and to have their charges change in a consistent direction.
  
• The salty fluid of our cells would tend to "short out" any large-scale charge separation.
  
• The proteins within the cell are somewhat insulated from the extracellular fluid and other cells by the cell wall.
  
• Compressing the molecules in the cell wall will not produce an external charge, since the structure of the cell wall is fairly symmetrical.
  
• Its not easy to collect any charge, since dry skin is a reasonable electrical insulator.

So I don't think that most liquid-dissolved proteins in a living body could be usable as piezoelectric sources. (On the other hand, enamel in teeth is a crystalline solid, and is more similar to bone - but I'm not volunteering to have my teeth knocked out to generate a miniscule amount of piezoelectricity!)