CHAPTER 5
How Neurons Generate Signals
It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment
of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected
the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being
into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morn-
ing; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was
nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I
saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a con-
vulsive motion agitated its limbs.So goes the story of how Victor Frankenstein discovered he could use
the power of electricity to bring life to the body he had constructed.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) began writing her cele-
brated story of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1816, when
she was eighteen years old.
Twenty-five years earlier, Luigi Galvani had described his exper-
iments on electricity and the stimulation of movement in muscles
—evoking movement in legs dissected away from the bodies of dead
frogs. Electricity could make dead muscles move. Beginning in the
first years of the 1800s the word galvanize came to mean to charge,
excite, animate, exhilarate, arouse, electrify. There was a buzz in the