There’s an article in New York Times Magazine about using electrical signals in the nervous system to signal to the rest of the body to somehow alter molecular signaling outside the nervous system. Neuroscientists have known for a while that neurons transmit messages by electro-chemical signals: at each synapse, an electrical impulse arrives from a cell body, is converted to a chemical message via neurotransmitters. The chemical message jumps across the synapse, where it is again converted into an electrical signal at the next (postsynaptic) neuron. For some reason though, the thought that electrical signals interact with non-nervous system elements (like the immune system) has not been very popular; the idea that one could manipulate the electrical signals to “hijack” downstream molecular signaling without affecting neural communication itself seems like magic.