Emotions as Bioelectricity: When the Body Thinks in Current
Emotions as Bioelectricity: When the Body Thinks in Current
By Jackson Cionek – Brain Bee Ideas / Inosciência
Introduction – The electric body and the emotional discharge
Whenever I feel an intense emotion, it strikes me as something physical before it is psychological.
It isn’t a thought — it’s a discharge.
As if my whole body became a circuit, and the emotion were only the glow of that current moving through my synapses.
Over time, I came to understand that what we call an emotion is not a defined feeling but a transient bioelectrical pattern — energy in motion as the body reorganizes itself to act.
Behind every emotional impulse lies an invisible field of tensional selves (Eus Tensionais): fine electrical configurations that shape how we perceive, react, and belong.
1. Emotion: electrical movement between body and environment
The word emotion comes from emovere — to move outward.
Yet before any visible expression, an electrical shift occurs inside the body.
Action potentials propagate through neurons, muscles, and viscera.
The heart speeds up, skin conductivity rises, and the body’s electrical field changes.
These impulses create bodily maps of emotion, as Antonio Damasio describes.
They are fast, automatic patterns that precede conscious thought.
Before we feel “anger” or “joy,” the body has already altered its frequency, pressure, and rhythm.
Emotion is therefore the electrical form of feeling — a language the body understands before the mind does.
2. Tensional Selves: the electrical architecture of the self
I call these Tensional Selves dynamic nodes of energy arising from micro-fluctuations in the body’s bioelectrical and biochemical fields.
They are subtle knots of tension that organize behavior, perception, and reaction.
Every emotion is a microcircuit of energy and anergia:
Energy is the free impulse — the current that moves toward expression, gesture, and belonging.
Anergia, in the Cionekian sense, is energy of difficult metabolism — a current that wants to flow but meets resistance — structural, emotional, or cultural.
In classical physiology, anergia means lack or absence of energy.
But in my framework, anergia is contained power — electric potential trapped between the impulse to act and the fear of existing.
When Tensional Selves find release through breath, movement, speech, or art, anergia turns into fruition.
When retained, it becomes anxiety, rigidity, or ideological confinement — the Zone 3 of blocked expression.
3. Energy, anergia, and existential metabolism
The brain is an electrical organ oscillating in rhythmic fields.
Each emotion is a variation in voltage, and the balance between energy and anergia defines our mental state.
When energy flows freely, the body acts coherently, and consciousness expands (Zone 2).
When blocked, energy accumulates as anergic fields, and consciousness narrows (Zone 3).
This neural anergia feels like an invisible weight — a circuit that never completes, an impulse that never becomes gesture.
It is the background of unprocessed emotion — pain that hasn’t become learning, affection that hasn’t become presence.
Yet within that containment lies power.
Anergia is the reservoir of transcendence: the place where blocked energy can be re-encoded as creative or spiritual action.
4. Emotional synchrony: when bodies feel together
Emotions are not private events.
Research shows that during collective experiences — rituals, music, dance — brains synchronize electrically.
Neural waves phase-lock, hearts align, and breathing rhythms converge.
This inter-brain coupling reveals that to feel is to connect.
Emotion is the electrical field where bodies communicate.
Bioelectricity is therefore social: it links the singular to the collective, the individual to the Earth.
In such harmony, each participant becomes a Zone 2 within the collective organism — a living, conscious system acting as one.
5. From discharge to fruition: emotion as bridge
Emotions bridge instinct and consciousness.
When integrated, they mature into stable feelings — part of the existential metabolism.
When repressed, they accumulate as anergia — energy that cannot yet speak.
The transition from Zone 3 to Zone 2 does not demand effort but physiological listening — allowing the current to move without judgment.
Fear becomes attention; anger becomes protection; joy becomes neural expansion.
Emotion ceases to be noise and turns into the electrical music of consciousness.
Conclusion – The body as the electric temple of consciousness
Emotion is the first flash of thought.
Each electrical impulse carries intention, memory, and the seed of transcendence.
The body is the temple where this current becomes gesture.
When we understand that anergia is not absence but blocked energy,
we begin to see in tension and silence the potential for transformation.
Fruition appears when the circuit reopens.
Consciousness then ceases to be a point in the brain and becomes a living electrical field, pulsing between body, emotion, and world.
Post-2020 References
McIntosh M.A. & Khalsa S.S. (2021). The Electric Body: Neural and Physiological Correlates of Emotional Processing. Nature Neuroscience Reviews, 24(9), 621–634.*
Berntson G.G. & Cacioppo J.T. (2022). Autonomic and Bioelectrical Pathways of Emotion. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 45, 77–101.*
Northoff G. & Scalabrini A. (2021). Consciousness and Brain Energy: Linking Electrodynamics and Emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(12), 997–1010.*
Czeszumski A. et al. (2022). Inter-Brain Synchrony During Shared Emotional Experience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 16, 894522.*
Damasio A. (2021). Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon Books.
Buzsáki G. (2023). Rhythms of the Brain – Updated Edition. Oxford University Press.
Brain Bee Summary
Emotion is the electrical field of being.
Tensional Selves are its nodes of energy and anergia.
Anergia is not emptiness — it is energy that has not yet found a voice.
Fruition is the moment this current turns into light:
when the body thinks in electricity and feels in freedom.
