THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 69
was executed at New York’s Auburn
Prison. A report in the New York Her-
ald described the condemned man
thrashing about for minutes, “until
the room was filled with the odor of
burning flesh and strong men fainted
and fell like logs upon the floor.”
I
n the mid-nineteenth century, a
schoolboy in northern Spain named
Santiago Ramón y Cajal saw a local
priest who’d been lethally struck by
lightning while ringing his church’s
bell. Years later, after Ramón y Cajal
had become known as the father of
neuroscience, an achievement that won
him a Nobel Prize, he recalled the
event in his autobiography:
There, beneath the bell, enveloped in dense
smoke, his head hanging over the wall lifeless,
lay the poor priest who had thought that he
would be able to ward off the threatening dan-
ger by the imprudent tolling of the bell. Sev-
eral men climbed up to help him and found
him with his clothes on fire and with a terri-
ble wound on his neck from which he died a
few days later. The bolt had passed through
him, mutilating him horribly.
Jorgensen relates that Ramón y Cajal
regarded this incident as a watershed
in his life and speculates that his great
scientific achievements—deciphering
the basic structure of the nervous sys-
tem and discovering the neuron—may
have their origin in a “transformative”
encounter with lightning.
Ramón y Cajal’s establishment of
the neuron as the fundamental unit
of the nervous system led to decades
of research investigating how it works;
he found that neurons propagate elec-
trical impulses that are controlled by
the passage of ions, specifically so-
dium or potassium. Jorgensen pro-
vides an elegant description of the
process and of recent attempts to ex-
ploit this knowledge by developing
high-tech devices to compensate for
sensory deficits: cochlear implants
for deafness, electrodes in the retina
or in the visual cortex of the brain
for blindness.
He relates the case of a woman,
Melissa Loomis, whose right fore-
arm was amputated after an infection
from a raccoon bite. Each year, a mil-
lion or so people across the world un-
dergo an amputation, but Loomis was
comparatively fortunate, receiving ac-
cess not merely to an artificial limb
but to a neuroprosthesis—a device
that links the human nervous system
to an electronic mechanism. This kind
of brain-machine interface captures
nerve signals from the brain and trans-
lates them into electrical signals that
are relayed to a computer-controlled
electronic device. The translation is
possible because nerve signals, like
digital ones, are binary.
When healthy, our nerves conduct
electricity in a tightly controlled way,
in order to transmit information to all
parts of the body. In this sense, illness
can sometimes be synonymous with
uncontrolled electricity. Jorgensen de-
scribes epilepsy, for instance, as being
like “an electrical storm in the brain.”
Recent research suggests that mi-
graines, too, may have a genesis resem-
bling a seizure, with electrical activity
in the brain stem releasing proteins
that trigger pain. (Anti-epileptic med-
ications such as topiramate are used
to prevent migraines.)
Shocking the brain with electric-
ity under highly controlled circum-
stances can be effective in treating
major depressive disorders, even
though the precise mechanism isn’t
fully understood. A more selective
and recently developed neurological
application of electricity is deep brain
stimulation, or DBS, which is used to
treat Parkinson’s disease and other
motor disorders. Electrodes are im-
planted in the area of the brain to be
electrically stimulated and wired up
to a controller housed in the chest.
DBS is sometimes described as a
pacemaker for the brain. Electrical
stimulation of the heart has a longer
history, the first pacemaker having
been implanted in 1958. An electrode
is threaded inside the heart which
gives small shocks at a rate of about
sixty per minute, in order to stimu-
late the muscle to pump normally.
Jorgensen notes that the technology
owes its success largely to the inven-
tion of a commercially viable transis-
tor, in 1948, which made possible the
miniaturization of electronics. Today,
some three million Americans are es-
timated to have a cardiac pacemaker,
and the device has become a model
for a newer invention, the “breathing
pacemaker,” to treat sleep apnea.
“When breathing stops, it sends an
electrical impulse to an electrode in
the throat that shocks the relaxed tis-
sues into contracting, thus reopening
the airway,” Jorgensen writes.
I
n my case, there would have to have
been a serious complication during
treatment for a pacemaker to be nec-
essary. Eventually, I was discharged
from the emergency room with a beta-
blocker prescription, to suppress the
runaway electricity in my heart. But
the side effects proved intolerable; even
at low doses, my heart rate slowed so
much that I could not climb a flight
of stairs without stopping and gasp-
ing for air.
I consulted a cardiologist at my own
hospital, Peter Zimetbaum, who is an
expert in arrhythmias, and he per-
formed an ablation to eradicate the er-
rant pathway. Zimetbaum threaded
catheters into the right and left fem-
oral vessels in my groin and up into
my heart. He injected small doses of
isoproterenol, an adrenaline-like drug,
which artificially induced the tachy-
cardia that had landed me in the hos-
pital. Then he mapped the pathways
conducting electricity in my heart—
the one that would carry normal im-
pulses and the aberrant one that caused
the heartbeat of a hundred and eighty.
After he pinpointed the aberration,
he destroyed it with heat from high-
frequency radio waves. I was awake
throughout the procedure, with just
low doses of a painkiller, so that I could
report whether what I experienced re-
capitulated that July morning.
After Zimetbaum had finished per-
forming the ablation, he tried to trig-
ger my tachycardia again, but my heart
stayed steady. Electricity gone awry
could have ended my life. Electricity in
expert hands identified the defect in
my heart and eliminated it. Now I was
again a healthy body electric.
