Electrical response of living tissue

Bose, in Response in the Living and Non-Living (1902), regarded the electrical changes of excited tissue as physiological. Any condition that raised physiological activity raised their intensity. Poison that killed the tissue removed the response, and anesthetics such as chloroform weakened it and finally abolished it.¹ In Plant Response as a Means of Physiological Investigation (1906) he described a shock of stimulus as causing molecular derangement in the plant. Mechanical movement needed particular structural arrangements to show well. Electrical response, he wrote, needed only the molecular change that accompanies excitation.²

Bayliss, in Principles of General Physiology (1915), noted that disturbance in nerve goes with a temporary negativity. Some observers held that the two are not necessarily connected. Bayliss reported that Keith Lucas found none of their results free from objection and no reason to doubt that the two are identical. Lucas still wanted stricter proof.³ Bayliss explained that Du Bois Reymond's term, negative variation, uses negative to mean diminution, and he tied the response to loss of impermeability at the excited spot.⁴ Lillie (1923) explained such effects by variations of permeability. He held that apparently inert cells, such as epidermal cells, are irritable like muscle and nerve, and he cited Waller's view that an electric response to mechanical stimulation is the surest sign of life in such tissue.⁵

In The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926) Bose described excitation as having two expressions. One was the mechanical response of motile organs. The other was the electric response of all tissues, motile or not.⁶ He tested this on Mimosa. When the leaf was held in a fixed position, the electric response was the same as before. He concluded that the mechanical and electric responses are independent manifestations of a common excitatory reaction.⁷ He also reported that a pulvinus made immotile by excess water still gave an electric response. He took the electric response as proof that excitation is transmitted in ordinary plants.⁶

Abdul Kadir and colleagues (2018) wrote that many people wrongly see depolarisation of the resting potential as always excitatory and hyperpolarization as necessarily inhibitory.⁹ Silic and Zhang (2023) described the action potential as a large, rapid depolarization from negative to more positive membrane potential. They noted that such potentials are barely reported outside neuronal and muscular tissues.⁸