Michael Levin

Wordpress site is up - thoughtforms.life. Register to be notified of book progress, specific events, news, and new posts with photography, essays, interviews, & more. Unlike at drmichaellevin.org, here I will post ideas not fully baked yet, & academic-adjacent content.

@SurrealBlend That’s what the instructions say now but I think it should be reusable as long as the battery holds.

@drmichaellevin Pretty cool, I would definitely try it. Is it intended to be single use (like one 24h cycle)?

check this out - interesting new device: Biobeat bio-beat.com Non-invasive system for measuring blood pressure over a 24 hour period. Much more convenient than a cuff or arterial catheter line, and lots of useful information relative to activities during the day. They have FDA clearance with validation (testing shows +/- <5 mm/Hg difference compared to cuff or a-line). I tested it myself for 24 hours - very cool system, works well! Couple of published studies: nature.com/articles/s4137… frontiersin.org/journals/physi… (just an early user and fan of new biometric tech, not working for or paid by the company)

@MicahZoltu I don’t know; you can email the company but I’m hoping it will be available readily. I guess that’s up to the regulatory bodies in each country.

@drmichaellevin Can a person actually buy one of these, or is this yet another doctor gated device that requires a prescription from a GP in the US and diagnosis with a disease and insurance before you can get it?

@madhavajay I don’t know; it’s easy to use so there’s no reason it couldn’t be sold directly but I am not sure what the regulations are etc.

@drmichaellevin Wow that’s really brilliant! As someone who's had to do multiple 24-hr cuff tests that basically wake you up all night this looks great. I assume it’s for clinical use only and you can’t buy one as a consumer?

@MarkGPatterson That’s what the instructions say but the battery lasted well past 24 hours for me, so perhaps it doesn’t have to be single use. You can get a replacement sticker thing, so I think it’s just up to the battery.

@drmichaellevin single use???

I don't know about #2 and #3, but re. #1, check the studies I linked to - they did a lot of work on this and the data look good, compared to the gold standard method measurements taken at the same time. I don't think you could wear two at once, given where it needs to be located - can't fit 2 there; but I don't think you need to, given the testing.

Interesting. Though with any sensor of any kind there is the problem of calibration. If you wish to see just how precise and reliable is try wearing two of them at the same time (if possible in this case) then compare the outputs in few days of use. Then try again in a month or two (drift ossues). Second. Valid for all digital sensors with remote data collection (phone, wi-fi erc), is your data yours? Who can access your data? Third. Is the data digitally signed by the sensor itself?

Just fyi, the effects of electromagnetics of all kinds on living cells has been known for a long time before that. For example, Slater, J. W. (1885) — "Influence of magnetism upon insect development," Proceedings of the Entomology Society of London, xv. Windle, Bertram C., (1895), "On the effects of electricity and magnetism on development", Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, 29: 346-351 Pearl, Raymond (1900) — "Studies in electrotaxis," American Journal of Physiology, 4: 96–123 Frazee, Oren E. (1909) — "The effect of electrical stimulation upon the rate of regeneration in Rana pipiens and Amblystoma jeffersonianum," Journal of Experimental Zoology, 7: 457–476 This is a pretty good book: Kholodov, Yu. A. (1966) — "Effect of Electromagnetic and Magnetic Fields on the Central Nervous System" And much more. You can download a massive bibliography of relevant studies here: thoughtforms.life/my-reference-l…

@drmichaellevin @AmmousMD Saw this video after people shared it in relationship to this paper (x.com/davidasinclair…). He had apparently warned us that EMFs can cause changes in our cells but people ignored him and his research was dismissed and funding stopped for his research x.com/the_no_mind/st…

In the 1970s, surgeon Robert Becker demonstrated that electrical currents can stimulate bone and wound healing in humans. So why didn’t this field explode? Because his research also revealed the biological risks of constant electrical exposure. So it was buried.

Lecture 24 of evolutionary robotics course: Differentiable robots. youtu.be/B56x986YQDw

I’m not sure if you have a specific application in mind, or if you mean human data (which is not in vivo yet), but in general, almost of our bioelectric work is has been in vivo, not cell culture. Birth defects repair, whole organ induction, appendage regeneration, cancer normalization - all in vivo.

@mike_lustgarten @drmichaellevin Epigenetic reprogramming already has mammalian proof-of-concept. Bioelectric signaling remains cell-culture elegant but unproven at organism scale. I'll take bench science with timeline implications over theoretical elegance.

Epigenetic reprogramming might make an impact on slowing/reversing age-related changes, but the biggest bang for the buck will be bioelectric signalling restoration via @drmichaellevin's approach

@GabeMasson 🙏

@drmichaellevin Oh! My comment about refs was directed towards Dr. Ammous and his comments, and not to you! Huge fan since 2014 here, btw. Just LOVE your dedication and consistency. 🙌 🔬

Yep (drmichaellevin.org, but we do a lot more than bioelectricity). Also, there are other great labs in the field (e.g., health.ucdavis.edu/dermatology/fa…, cuanschutz.edu/graduate-progr…, and lots more; some here: drmichaellevin.org/resources/othe…), and check out the journal: journals.sagepub.com/home/BIE

@aryacame @drmichaellevin @AmmousMD @grok Literally, Levin's labs. That's why he's talking about it.

Yep. I've read their books. I don't doubt for a minute that there was resistance to the data on potential harms of EMF. What I'm saying is that this is 1) largely irrelevant to the regenerative medicine work, and 2) with the exception of a few national security topics, "governmental agencies" don't stop you from doing research. They may not want to fund you, as for example NIH may need to reject 90%+ of applications in general, but no one stops you from doing research on these topics (including EMFs) if you find private, industry (biotech), foundation, or other $ for the work. There are many topics governmental agencies won't fund; and yes it's a nightmare to search for funding all the time. And yet, the answer isn't that anyone is suppressing regenerative therapeutics. We have many problems in how science is supported, but let's have a realistic picture of what those problems are and aren't.

@drmichaellevin I would suggest you read his and Andrew Marino's books. They discuss in detail how they had many interactions with governmental agencies that didn't want any information on the potential harms of EMF coming out.

@GabeMasson @Madam_Mito @AmmousMD Btw, I give extensive references in all of my papers on the subject - references to people who have done peer-reviewed, good work on this topic. Check out any of the papers here: drmichaellevin.org/publications/b… You will find all the references to the actual work.

@Madam_Mito @AmmousMD @drmichaellevin My personal point was centered about giving references when possible and not so much about the effectiveness or veracity of the claims in question.

Well, what does "suppressed" mean exactly? He had a paper on this in Nature, which is often considered the top of the food chain. So it wasn't *too* suppressed... Now, I wasn't there to see his manuscript reviews or grant submission reviews - so I don't know how bad it was for him, but "suppressed" sounds like some shadowy cabal is trying to hide something. That's not what happens; what happens is that a new field, which doesn't make good contact with the mainstream ideas (i.e., doesn't give narrow and harried reviewers an incentive to dig in and get invested) has a very hard time. I could tell 1000 horror stories on this... But it's not because anyone is trying to hide anything. It's because people have limited time, limited attention spans, and they're fighting their own battles and have no time for anyone else's wild ideas. It makes for difficult reviews of manuscripts and grant proposals, which of course holds things back. But it's a natural limitation that's true of all new and unconventional ideas - we have to work extra hard to get buy-in. I don't know any way around it (because let's face it, bad crazy ideas greatly outnumber genius crazy ideas, so everyone bets accordingly) but if we work hard and connect to things others care about, eventually ideas shift and become "we knew it all along" while some new frontier is getting smacked down :-)

@drmichaellevin But his work was suppressed, correct?

@NotDrAbeFroman In the sense of establishing voltage patterns that could persist? Possibly. We are checking.

@drmichaellevin if electroceuticals are a thing, then do there exist virus-like analogs in that solution space as well?

Lecture 23 of evolutionary robotics course: Soft robots. youtu.be/_N20vZEhQ5I

Lecture 22 of evolutionary robotics course: Evolving bodies and brains. youtu.be/Z7Ca0cmXyQs

The only thing I can say more or less strongly is that I don't think a computational view of the world is sufficient (i.e., our formal model of computation doesn't match well to absolutely everything of importance in the world). After that, the answer is, I don't know because we don't have data on that yet. Is it infinite? is it dense or sparse? I can make conjectures but at this point it's not necessary for forward progress, and wouldn't be be based on much, so I don't do it. These questions are certainly on our list.

New #preprint: @BeneHartl @LPiolopez arxiv.org/abs/2604.01932 "BraiNCA: brain-inspired neural cellular automata and applications to morphogenesis and motor control" Abstract: Most of the Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) defined in the literature have a common theme: they are based on regular grids with a Moore neighborhood (one-hop neighbour). They do not take into account long-range connections and more complex topologies as we can find in the brain. In this paper, we introduce BraiNCA, a brain-inspired NCA with an attention layer, long-range connections and complex topology. BraiNCAs shows better results in terms of robustness and speed of learning on the two tasks compared to Vanilla NCAs establishing that incorporating attention-based message selection together with explicit long-range edges can yield more sample-efficient and damage-tolerant self-organization than purely local, grid-based update rules. These results support the hypothesis that, for tasks requiring distributed coordination over extended spatial and temporal scales, the choice of interaction topology and the ability to dynamically route information will impact the robustness and speed of learning of an NCA. More broadly, BraiNCA provides brain-inspired NCA formulation that preserves the decentralized local update principle while better reflecting non-local connectivity patterns, making it a promising substrate for studying collective computation under biologically-realistic network structure and evolving cognitive substrates.