People used to think that nerves were literally pipes, conveying impulses in the form of pressure waves of water. Even 100 years ago, this 'hydraulic' view was still influencing psychologists such as Freud, with his ideas about mental pressures building up inside the brain.
Still, after physiologists Hodgkin and Huxley explained nerve conduction as an electrical phenomenon in 1952, the hydraulic theory was killed off forever. ...or so we thought. But it's back from the dead, in the form of a quite remarkable paper in the remarkable journal Medical Hypotheses: Impulses and pressure waves cause excitement and conduction in the nervous system The German authors, Barz, Schreiber and Barz, argue that:
The elastic properties of cells, nerve and muscle fibres allow mechanical impulses to be carried (comparable with the blood pulse in the arterial vessel system), and therefore they can conduct energy or information.
Orthodoxy holds that as an electrical ...
