Is electricity in our body the same as on grid?

Andrew Morris, science educator, with the answer...

Andrew - It's a question that comes up in my discussion groups; the nature of electricity. And of course, the remarkable thing is that everything is electrical, atoms are electrical. And the amazing fact that we live in a neutral world in which we're not, by and large, affecting each other by positive and negative charges, is an amazing balance. But the intrinsic nature of atoms is that they're composed of negative and positive parts. When you can separate them and make either the negative or the positive part flow in a direction, you've got an electrical current, which is a source of energy. And there are many different ways in which electrical currents can occur. Now, metals are materials in which some electrons are released from the atoms of the metal, the copper or the iron or whatever, and they become a kind of cloud of freely moving electrons. And again, when you apply a voltage across them, that drives these electrons in a current. Certainly, when I first started to think about nerves, and the fact we send electrical signals through nerves, I wondered if it was basically the same? And it's utterly different. It's not at all the same, but it does depend on ions. It does depend on these potassium and sodium ions in the tissue of a nerve. And the actual passage of an electrical pulse, the signal in a nerve, is simply caused by charged ions moving in and out of the cell in a kind of wave-like fashion. So it's a bit like a Mexican wave. The passage of the electrical signal down the length of a nerve is in fact due to the moving in and out of ions across the membrane of that nerve, not in any way like electrons flowing through a metal.