I have encountered several articles and posts saying that what electrocute you and cause death is actually not the voltage but the current instead but is not clear to me how this works.
In: Physics
Electricity kills in two ways: gross physical burns, and disruption of the autonomic nervous system. If you happen to be, say, struck by lightning, then odds are good that you die from having large bits of you incinerated. If you are electrocuted by, say, the electric chair, they will run about two thousand volts to punch a a dozen amps through your brain, spine and heart. The trick is that the sack of skin around you isn’t really a good conductor, and there’s a lot of other insulating and dissipative factors between your nerves and the outside of your body, but if you can get as few as a couple of hundred milliamps directly applied to the heart you can disrupt its operation. That was how the first defibrillator was proven, with open heart surgery and conductive pads. As to why, that’s just a feature of biology. The nervous system is just more reactive to amperage.
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