This thread was originally in GS&P and died. I am bringing it back to life here so that experts can discuss it. This first post is a quote from VisionFromFeeling with the title being the subject of this thread.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=4600615#post4600615
Electrical charge
The center of an atom consists of the nucleus, which is made out of individual particles of protons and neutrons. Both protons and neutrons have roughly the same mass, but protons also have an electrical charge of +1 for each whereas neutrons have no charge. If you look at the Periodic table of the elements, which is a tabular depiction of all the different types of atoms, N, which is short for Nitrogen, has the number 7 which means that nitrogen is an atom that has seven protons in its nucleus. Therefore a nitrogen nucleus will have a total electrical charge of +7.
The atomic nuclei attract electrons. Electrons are other particles, that are much smaller than the proton or the neutron, but each electron carries an electrical charge of -1. Electrons and protons are attracted to each other in a similar way as the north pole of a magnet is attracted to the south pole of a magnet. There exists an attractive force between these opposite electrical charges that will actually pull these particles closer together. Electrons shimmer around the nucleus. If you add seven electrons to the nitrogen nucleus the positive and the negative charges cancel and you end up with an electrically neutral nitrogen atom. If you add extra electrons to nitrogen it becomes overall negatively charged. If you remove some electrons from nitrogen it becomes overall positively charged.
So every proton and every electron has an electric charge around it. When they come together into atoms, the electrons tend to move around the nucleus in a symmetrical way to cover the space surrounding the nucleus in a uniform electron distribution. All types of atoms attract electrons but some types of atoms are much stronger in that attractive force than are other. So when atoms connect together into molecules we start to see electric dipoles because of that, which are "uneven electron sharing". Oxygen for instance will keep the molecule's shared electrons more to itself and leaves carbon and hydrogen atoms with less electron density. Molecules of all kinds, with very different molecular dipoles form the material of the human body.
Charge separation and voltage
When opposite charges are separated, they want to get together. Ions are atoms that have either more, or fewer, electrons than protons and so ions have an overall positive or negative electrical charge. A battery contains two separate containers. One contains positively charged ions and the other contains negatively charged ions. When a battery is connected to an electronic circuit or appliance, electrons will move from the negative side and across the wire to the positive side, and of course the battery is dead when all of that electron flow has taken place.
A battery has a voltage. Voltage comes about due to charge separation. Many things in the body are run with voltage. For instance there are channels in cell walls that open once the inside of the cell has a large enough amount of sodium ions to create just the right voltage, or charge build-up.
Electrical fields
Electrical charges, stemming from the protons and the electrons, and therefore existing in the atoms, in the molecules, and in the human body, will always be surrounded by an electric field. An electric field is a force field and is simply the description of how the + and - electrical charges attract each other across space and how + and +, and - and -, repel one another. This electric force is always the strongest the closest to the actual charge and it gets weaker as you go further away from it. It is similar to the gravitational field of earth, which attracts objects toward itself, but you also know that the gravitational field gets weaker as you go further away from the earth. When you see dust clinging to the computer screen it is because of the electric force taking place in an electrical field, and charges in the screen and charges in the dust are attracted to each other! When charges are stationary, their electric field is stationary as well. But when charges move, their electrical fields move with them.
Magnetic fields
When an electrical field moves, it creates a magnetic field. There is always some magnetism even around stationary atoms because of the way electrons move about the atoms. Another form of magnetic field is created when individual electrons, or atoms, move from one place to another.
Electromagnetic fields
When charges move, their moving electric field can create a magnetic field, and a magnetic field can create an electric field. Electromagnetic radiation consists of both an electric and magnetic field interwoven and they take turns creating the other and vanishing.
Once electromagnetic radiation has been created it will move in a certain direction outward from its source and continues. Like the sun creating sunshine which is electromagnetic radiation and has traveled this far. Even if the sun were to be destroyed, the electromagnetic radiation it had created so far would continue even with its source no longer there. So, electromagnetic radiation is self-sustaining once it has left its source.
Electromagnetic radiation, is the same as light, and vibrates as it moves along. Depending on how fast it vibrates, its frequency, it will seem to be very different. Electromagnetic radiation that moves among the fastest is for example gamma radiation and X-rays. Radiation that is slower, is for instance the ultraviolet rays. Slower than that we have the visible light, through violet light, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red light. Light that moves even slower than red is infrared light and that is the same as heat! Electromagnetic radiation can have any value of its frequency and this is a continuous range, rather than the individual steps I have given.
All electromagnetic radiation, regardless of how fast it moves, is essentially the same thing. But the human body can only see light whose frequency is within the visible range, even though it is plausible that light that moves faster or slower than that would actually "look like something" too if only our eyes were perfect! And also, infrared light is the only light that we can feel, and that our brain interprets as heat, even though all of light would essentially "feel like something" just as well. Human perception gives a narrow experience of light.
Light emissions from the human body
The human body emits a lot of infrared light, or heat. Our bodies take energy from the chemical bonds of food and as that energy is used it becomes converted into heat, and that is a form of electromagnetic radiation.
Every nerve signal in the body, whether to transmit to your brain what your hands are feeling, enable a muscle contraction, or the thoughts that you have, all involve charged particles in the body moving. And that creates electromagnetic emission. In and around your body is electromagnetism of many forms, and all the time.
Electromagnetic radiation that is emitted and released and begins to move out and away from its source such as your body, can't be expected to last forever. This light, as it bumps into atoms in the air, in walls, and in all the other things, gets bent and distorted, or even absorbed inside of atoms where it is picked up by electrons, its energy spent, and released out again with less energy than it came with and therefore a lower frequency. X-rays are dangerous because they have so much energy that the electrons that intended to pick up this radiation can actually become removed from the atoms because of that, making those atoms upset and looking for new electrons to replace them and stealing electrons from other atoms and in the process ripping molecules in the body apart. When X-rays are used in medical imaging, doctors and patients sometimes wear lead screens, because the X-rays are taken up by lead atoms and converted into harmless heat radiation!
Radio waves, that are used for transmission of radio channels, are electromagnetism as well and last quite well because they already have very low frequency, less so than heat, to be disturbed much.
The electromagnetism that your body creates comes from many functions in the body, from a muscle contraction, heartbeat, nerve signal, and your thoughts, are continuously emitted around you and radiate outward. They are not contained as a bundle of electromagnetic radiation that would somehow cluster and stay in the body as an electromagnetic aspect of yourself. If this were the essence of a human soul, it would rather seem that this soul radiates out from you and far from your body at all times. And if it were instead constantly re-created, once the body dies it no longer generates new electromagnetism in this way and what electromagnetism was there would probably end up scattered. I do not think that a human soul would consist of electromagnetism.
So, if there is a soul in the body, perhaps it would be made of something different than the electromagnetism that our bodies generate. As for the soul being composed of the voltage distribution pattern across the body, I somehow seriously doubt that as well.
Keep in mind that science is still in its youth, there are so many things that can not be accessed by the human consciousness or sensory perception, or even with the current most modern scientific instrumentation that can detect and interpret many of the things that we humans can not reach ourselves. It is only plausible to expect new and more discoveries of the world we live in, and with this we must remember to remain open-minded and to consider alternative ideas without immediate rejection simply due to the fact that they are not already part of what is known.
Here's what I said: