The electric hum of life may have originated with primordial lightning
There's an electrical hum in most animals, including ourselves. No one knows where it came from or why exactly it exists. Now, new research suggests this electric hum came from primordial lightning.
In most vertebrates and invertebrates, there is constant background cellular electrical activity, often coursing through the nervous system, with a small frequency range from 5 to 45 Hertz — well below the range of human hearing for sound waves. A new study, published in the journal International Journal of Biometeorology, notes this extremely low frequency (ELF) range overlaps with natural vibrations in the atmosphere caused by lightning. ...
"About 20 years ago, we started to discover that many biological systems, from the simplest of organisms like zooplankton in the ocean to our brains, have electrical activity in exactly the same frequency range as that produced by global lightning activity," Colin Price, lead author on the new study and researcher at the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Tel Aviv University in Israel, told Live Science. "We think that on evolutionary timescales, over billions of years, life-forms may have used what nature has given them and have somehow either synchronized to those frequencies or adapted to them."
Around the planet, flashes of lightning strike the ground 50 to 100 times per second. These strikes have been known since the 1960s to create extremely low frequency waves of electromagnetic energy that resonate around the planet's atmosphere t. Known as Schumann resonances, these ELF waves have encircled the planetor billions of years — ever since Earth has had an atmosphere. While the strongest resonance is at a frequency close to 8 Hz, several others occur between 3 and 60 Hz.Today, Schumann resonances can be measured anywhere on Earth that is electrically quiet, such as in a desert, far from electrical grids.
The new theory proposes primordial cells may have somehow synced their electric activity with these natural atmospheric resonances, particularly the peak resonance near 8 Hz. ...
Today, not all life vibrates at exactly the Schumann resonance. The researchers suggest that while early life was synced at around 8 Hz, the cellular activity in animals slowly drifted to other frequencies as the animals evolved, with different frequencies being used for different types of activity in the brain. For example, specific frequencies in human brain waves have been linked to specific mental states such as alertness, dreaming and deep sleep. The Schumann resonance is closest to frequencies found in humans' deep relaxed state, suggesting primordial life could have been in a state similar to deep relaxation. ...
The researchers are continuing to look at possible mechanisms as well as extending their work into the botany realm, looking for effects of these atmospheric resonances on photosynthesis.
"There's more and more evidence that there does appear to be links between these natural atmospheric frequencies and biological organisms," Price told Live Science. "But we don't understand it ⎯ what the connections are and how it's working, so it's just a start. We just published this to kind of put it out there. Hopefully others can advance it and go further on it."
