I am an electronic engineer so I do have some familiarity with the principles of electromagnetism. To create an electromagnetic wave you have to consider both the amount of charge, and the speed and distance of movement of this charge. In this case, we have a very small amount of ions moving over a very short distance over a relatively long period ( very low speed). I am at work at the moment and pressed for time but I think that if I worked the numbers it would result in a vanishingly small electromagnetic field, certainly much too small to influence the gate potential of an adjacent cell membrane in any meaningful way. We need to see millivolts to have any effect and the electromagnetic field with these starting conditions should work out to picovolts.
To make things worse, as soon as the activation wave starts to move along the cell dendrites and axons the net effect through the cell body would have to consider that the same thing is happening at both sides of the cell body, but in opposite signs, canceling on the lateral axis through the cell. This leaves the mechanism of field generation along the longitudinal aspect of the cell under consideration. In an unmyelinated fiber, we are looking at a propagation rate of about 0.5-2.0 m/s. Plugging these factors into the formula for the generation of electromagnetic potential yields a very tiny figure.
Restating the key issue: Gates trigger thresholds are in the range of 5o millivolts and the voltages due to electromagnetic mechanisms (both generation and reception) are several orders of magnitude less than this.
You are welcome to demonstrate the calculations for both the field formation and receptive antenna geometry to show me where I am missing the electromagnetic transmission mechanism but I am not able to see how it could work.
@dpatirniche Different from an electrostatic theory, when one allows the magnetic field to be part of the physical formalism that describes the operation of a biological organism, one will find that in order to compute the induced quantities, one has to integrate over the entire domain. This global perspective is what I mean by nested electromagnetic antennae. If one starts investigating more closely these aspects one might observe that exotic states (e.g. slow light, holography, cloaking, photonic crystals) can not be excluded, and that cables, as understood nowadays, are but naive projections of a much richer physical reality.
I would apply the same considerations to these areas of inquiry. This stuff is not magic - it takes a certain amount of energy to make things work and the available electromagnetic energy is vastly too small to have any meaningful influence. I would add that at a distance - the fields from the individual cells would decohere and all you would have is an averaged “brain-wave” which is what is measured in electroencephalography. With this method, even with direct contact with the skin, you can only read somewhere in the range of 10 µV to 100 µV. As with all energy, this drops off with cube power law distribution (filling space) so even at arm’s length, the signal is too small to be detected by any physical mechanism I am aware of.