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We often think of ourselves as solid beings moving through empty space. We assume our brains and their contents are locked in the vault of our skulls, churning out thoughts that stay trapped inside until we release them.
But we’re much more porous than that.
In reality, we’re bits of matter and lots of water held together by vast fields of energy. The atoms of our bodies are made up of energy. And electromagnetic (EM) energy binds the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that comprise the 60 percent of our bodies made up of water. If we didn’t have that electromagnetic energy in our bodies, we would disintegrate.
But EM also extends far beyond us. The entire planet is part of that system. Scientists have demonstrated that the electromagnetism in our bodies overlaps and possibly resonates with a set of electromagnetic pulses called the Schumann Resonances, which oscillate between the Earth’s surface and the upper atmosphere at a stable frequency of about 7.83 Hz. The phenomenon is sometimes known as Earth’s heartbeat.
At the Polytechnic University in Turin, Italy, anesthesiologist Marco Cavaglià, MD, PhD, and his collaborators are trying to create a map to understand how our human biology participates in this system; how that explains the emergence of thought, of consciousness, of self; and how to consciously align oneself to the environment for a healthier life. He is not proposing a new theory of consciousness, he says. Instead, the team is building a bridge between established findings across membrane biophysics, neuroscience, and electromagnetism. Informally, they talk about “going with the flow.”
“When we say ‘the flow,’ we are referring to the fact that living systems are not static objects,” says Tommaso Firaux, a researcher and neuroscientist on the team. “They are ongoing processes: continuous electrical activity, chemical exchange, fluid movement, and constantly changing membrane states. The brain is always adjusting, moment by moment by integrating signals from inside the body and from the environment.”
In other words, instead of a fixed machine executing instructions, the brain is a system that seeks stability while continuously adapting.
A key part of the team’s work focuses on how electromagnetic energy interacts with the brain’s physical fabric. The brain is about 75 percent water. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) protects the brain and spinal cord. There’s another kind of water, called vicinal water or exclusion zone water, that is an ordered layer of water molecules which forms next to surfaces like membranes or proteins, and its function has been compared to a battery. Water is polar—it carries ions and can respond to even a weak electromagnetic signal. The cell membrane though, is the mystery, according to researchers. This thin lipid layer wraps every neuron and its extensions, but until researchers understand the construction and functions of this layer better, they can’t know how it interacts with or generates energy.
“We know a lot about the proteins in neurons, but we know much less about how the lipids that make up the membranes are composed, arranged, and organized in real living cells,” Cavaglià says.
Neurons don’t respond uniformly across their structure: dendrites, the cell body, and the axon have distinct electrical behaviors. So, the team needs to understand them at the molecular level, including their membranes. They need to understand how lipid composition and organization differ from place to place in the cell and its extensions, because these differences can tune the electrical properties in each place. “The collection of signals from outside and inside create our map of the external world,” Cavaglià says, “they allow us to experience and participate in our three-dimensional reality.”
“The membrane is not just a container,” he continues. “It’s more like the material of the instrument. So two violins can play the same note, but the materials affect the resonance and stability.”
The team’s EMI framework (Energy–Mass–Information) describes this as a continuously evolving, multi-scale loop: energy flows through matter, matter’s structure shapes what patterns are possible, and those patterns carry information as a measurable organization of dynamics. The third ingredient—information—is defined in physics and biology as the structure and constraints that shape what a system can do next.
“The brain is not just energy moving through tissue; it is energy moving through a system that has learned to settle into stable patterns,” Firaux says. “In dynamical systems language, those stable patterns are called attractors, states the system naturally falls into and returns to, like valleys in a landscape.”
Cavaglià’s group argues that part of that landscape is physical: membranes are not rigid walls—they’re living, dynamic materials whose molecular organization can change how signals propagate, synchronize, and stabilize. In this view, “information” is what emerges when neural activity repeatedly finds and maintains stable, reproducible patterns that can guide perception, action, and ultimately the continuity of the self.
The scientists say our interaction with these energy fields works a little like an antenna. Most energy waves are invisible. Even though we can’t see them, they affect us. It’s like if you put a radio in an empty room, you won’t see any sound waves there. When you turn the radio on, you may hear music come out of it. The musicians aren’t in the radio. They’re not in the room. The radio is picking up signals sent from far away. The sound the radio makes is defined by the frequency it’s tuned to.
If you have more than one radio and those radios are tuned to different frequencies, the sound waves will cancel each other out, to some extent. You’ll hear bits and pieces, but it will be a cacophony. If they’re all tuned to the same frequency and station, though, the signal is amplified. A single song can amplify and fill the room. Within the boundaries of biology, humans can also tune in to different frequencies or to the same one.
If two people’s energy waves match in amplitude and frequency, they’ll line up perfectly, rising and falling together, and that makes the signal they’re producing grow. That’s called resonance. But if two waves have different frequencies they may cancel each other out–like a singer on one radio station making it hard to hear the music coming from the other station. That’s dissonance. The energy humans tap into and produce may be resonant or dissonant. “So, that’s why we can either resonate or hate each other at the first sight,” Cavaglià says. “It depends on the field we are expressing.”
This could explain a social science concept called collective resonance, in which strangers at a concert, sporting event, or even funeral wind up on what seems to be a shared wavelength.
At such events, Firaux says, “[attendees] are all exposed to the same structured inputs: music, chanting, synchronized movement, shared emotion, focused attention. Those elements are not just symbolic, they are rhythmic and physiological. They can influence breathing, heart rate, neural oscillations, and emotional tone. When many individuals are immersed in the same rhythm and emotional direction, their internal dynamics can begin to align.”
In neuroscience, he says, forms of “inter-brain synchronization” have been observed using techniques like hyperscanning, where brain activity across individuals is more synchronized during shared experiences. From the EMI perspective, collective resonance could reflect a temporary alignment of energy-information patterns across multiple brains and bodies. In that sense, collective resonance could be understood as a shared attractor state, emerging across individuals exposed to the same structured environment.
More About Your Mysterious Mind
However, a big difference between a radio and a person is that the radio isn’t shaped by what it’s playing. The transmissions don’t help the radio understand it exists. But humans are different. This, the scientists say, is because of what we do with the inputs we get from this field of energy.
“Once you have memory, language, and self-monitoring, the brain starts building a ‘semantic story,’ a coherent explanation of what’s happening and who ‘I’ am,” Firaux says. “So we can think of the brain as constantly interacting with rhythms—internal and external—and the outcome depends on whether the system falls into stable, coherent patterns or unstable, noisy ones.”
While some scientists tend to sense a whiff of pseudoscience in any research around consciousness, Cavaglia and Firaux point out that they’re not saying the theory is proven, merely that it’s based on established scientific knowledge and that it’s testable. If the model is correct, small changes in the membrane’s lipid “recipe” should predictably change how the brain settles into stable patterns, like how a violin made with different wood resonates differently. Those “default patterns” are what scientists call attractors, stable states that shape what we notice, how we feel, and how we respond.
“We are just biological interfaces that decode a signal that is out there in the universe,” Cavaglià says. “Then, this biological matrix, out of a self-awareness, starts telling a semantic story using logic. ‘Going with the flow’ means allowing the brain-body system to synchronize and stabilize so experience becomes clearer and less distorted by internal noise.”
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Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She’s covered ocean wave energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery; healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.