dornford (amio2@gte.net) wrote:
 
     Some information regarding electrical conduction through the
body.

     The body conducts electricity through electrochemical ion
transport.  This is different from conduction through a wire.  In a
wire, the amount of current that flows is proportional to the voltage
accross the wire, and inversely proportional to the resistance of the
wire ("Ohm's law").

     In an electrochemical system, as the voltage between electrodes
is increased, current at first scarecely flows at all, adn then, when
a critical voltage is reached, the current rapidly increases until it
reaches a plateau.  It stays at this plateau, typically, until a new
break point is reached, at whcich point the current once again
increases rapidly.  When current flows at one of these plateaus,
chemical actions occur at the electrodes.  For example, the first
plateau reached will be one at which oxygen is reduced at one
electrode and something is oxudized at the other.  Later, CO2 will be
reduced, and later still, salt will dissociate.

     Oxygen is reduced at about 650mV of potential.  More potential is
needed to make the other reactions work.

     In the body there are many potential conduction paths, though all
of then a re electrochemical in nature.  The lymph and the blood are
essentially salt water, and they will need about a volt and a half to
conduct significantly.  The skin is oily and contains many membranes,
and will mostly act as a resistor - it won't itself conduct well.  The
bones are mostly inorganic crystaline material with embedded ionic
conductive material.  However the nerves are apparently designed to be
good conductors.  We know that they support potential differences of
about 100 mV before they conduct, much less than the rest of the body.
One might assume that if they did not conduct better than the rest of
the body, they could scarcely work at all!

     We can therefore expect that small currents within the body will
tend to be conducted by the nerves primarily.

     The nerves themselves consist of long filaments attached to
central bodies in the brain and spinal cord.  They have many
interconnections between each other, and these connections themselves
behave rather like zener diodes - they conduct in spikes when the
potential accross them exceeds a certain level.  but not otherwise.
Nerves seem to communicate by the timing of the electrical pulses
between them, not the magnitude of the pulses.

     This means that the average potential between nerves is going to
be affected by the communication between them.  A continuous current
flowing up one nerve and down another is going to generate a varying
voltage as the nerves either connect or don't.

     In the case of the emeter, the cans are normally held by the
hands in such a way that the maximum number of nerve endings are in
contact with the cans.  The hands have among the highest density of
nerve endings in the body.  The curent flow between the cans is going
to predominantly pass through the nerves up to the brain and accross
the brain interfaces, and back down to the other hand.  In the case of
one hand electrodes, the current will flow up one set of nerves and
back down the adjacent set.  Since there are millions of these nerves
carrying the already small current, the voltage will be modulated by
the average nerve connections in the brain.

     Hence the emeter will essentially measure the degree of nerve
connection in the brain.  It will respond to the electrical activity
in the brain, in other words.

     It is fortunate that this is so, and no doubt was not at all
foreseen by either LRH or any of the people who developed lie
detectors or similar equipment.  However it turns out to be an elegant
way of monitoring brain activity, at least in the aggregate.

     All the rules of emeter operation - like instant reads, f/ns and
so on, are empirical.  LRH and others merely observed the correlations
and codified them.  This is not to negate their validity at all.

     Incidentally, neural research has shown that the brain can
respond prior to receiving a stimulus, a phenomenon not presently
allowed by physics.

dornford