STILL conneXXt Nr. 02 English

17 It’s nothing less than a revolution, originates in the Silicon Valley and has a pretty cool name: Thync. This does not describe some new iPhone from Apple, but is actually more a white “worry stone” which you hold to your temple to change the way you feel. A digital high thanks to App fingertip control – a kind of Iphonisation of the mind. This device has been available on the American market for almost a year now. Thync stimulates specific nerve cells in the brain using electric currents through skin contact. Whether he is concentrated or calm, wide awake and communicative – the self-optimised person always has the free choice. But how is it actually possible to influence the brain’s function using electric impulses? Are people electric beings? The answer is: yes. And our forefathers knew all about it. Even the Romans used electric current for healing. At that time they used conger eels and electric rays to generate the electric impulses, as a way of reducing pain or to numb those parts of the body against which they were held. One summer evening in 1789, the year of the revolution, Luigi Galvani, a professor of anatomy, saw how frogs’ legs, hung out by his wife to dry on the railing of their balcony, started twitching in rhythm. The contraction of the muscles was caused when the legs came into contact with copper and iron. Galvani’s wife had inadvertently created an electric circuit made up of two different metals, an electrolyte, the salt water on the frogs’ legs, and a “power indicator”, the muscles in the leg. “Galvanism” provided the funda- mentals for electro-biology and hence for devices such as the Thync. Even though we have no sense to identify electromagnetic fields, the body does conduct electric current through ions in the body’s fluids. For example, when transferring information to the synapses in our nerve cells. Our body is in effect a quasi biochemical plant, powered by electric currents – without us noticing. The most powerful electri- cal energy is actually produced by the heart, the body’s most powerful muscle. In the case of humans, the energy transition actually took place during the course of human evolution – we are electric beings. TRENDS & TECHNOLOGY Digitally relaxed: Thync can “fine tune” moods using electrodes and an App Picture: Thync

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