Why does a wet brain conduct electricity just fine but a wet computer gets fried?
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Your neurons have insulation just like the silicon in a circuit board or rubber around wires.
The problem is water bridging connections where it shouldn’t. As long as you sealed a computer’s individual “wires” perfectly, you could easily submerge it.
It is a common misconception that the brain runs on electricity in a similar fashion to electrical devices. Instead what happens is nerves relay signals by charge gradients in chemicals, sort of like how a battery produces charge. There isn’t enough charge to conduct through liquids to other signal sites and cause damage.
In electronic devices, currents are caused by electrons shifting across a platform of solid metal particles. Water damage to an electronic device happens when microscopic impurities and metal ions in water form links and connect two points of a phone’s metal circuitboard that aren’t normally connected by the original circuitry. This abnormal connection will create a short in the circuit and send an electric current to an area where there shouldn’t be one. This is what fries the device.
Unlike current in an electronic device where electrons that could be sent in a wrong direction, the brain’s current is created by ion imbalances across two aqueous spaces (the extracellular and intracellular spaces). The current a brain conducts is created by the charge difference between different ions (Na+, Cl-, and K+) moving back and forth across the neuron’s membrane through ion channels. The movement of ions creates a membrane potential that can propagate down the axon. Both a computer and a brain generate electric currents, but the nature of how those current’s charges travel happen in different ways.
Think of it like this: a computer is, essentially, one continuous electrical connection with trillions of branches. Eventually, they all lead back to the dame place. The brain, however, is trillions of individual loops at the tiniest of scales, that just happen to pass chemicals back and forth between each other (not electricity). It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s a good visualization. The brain is, in effect, an internet for the body, not an individual computer.
A wet brain is composed of living cells that are able to repair themselves. A wet computer is composed of inanimate objects that cannot repair themselves.
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