The BioEletric Matrix in You
By Bruno Coelho
I was watching a talk by Dr. Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, and something clicked for me:
That tweet was the compressed version of a huge realization for me, which is the fact that we, Humans, as a big colletive of cells, we are hardwired to reach a certain target state.
This article is my attempt to explain the ramifications of that realization.
Let me tell you a personal story. Since “forever”, I’ve always had this bad habit of biting my nails, and I also always dismissed it as a coping mechanism for when I felt stressed or anxious about “stuff”. But I’ve never allowed myself to spend time reflecting about what exactly I was stressed about because… I was too busy “working on something more important”. I’ve tried to stop doing it and even replacing it by something else but failed.
The only times where I was successful was when I was too busy to even bite my nails. Nothing like taking massive action to cure everything, right? Not quite…
I was taking massive action indeed but towards where? While I managed to build a successful career in the Software/Technology Development industry, I always also felt like I had potential to do better and more important work. I always felt like I had the potential to also be better, not just do better.
And, suddenly, this presentation by Dr. Levin really clicked. Suddenly I understood what Steve Jobs meant when he told Stanford graduates to “have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” He meant that our hearts and intuition already know the target, even if our conscious selves don’t know it yet!
So, this is the first time I’ve had actual language for something I’d always felt: that who we become is not fixed, that our environment shapes us at a level far deeper than habits or mindset and that the people we surround ourselves with are not just emotionally influencing us… they may be biologically reconfiguring us, if we let them.
The Talk That Started It
Dr. Levin’s research sits at the intersection of developmental biology, bioelectricity, and cognitive science. His lab has produced results that sound like science fiction but are published in Cell, Nature, and other peer-reviewed journals.
A few of the findings that blew my mind:
Axolotl cells “know” that their limbs were amputated and know when to stop regenerating. When scientists amputate a limb from certain species, the limb grows back. Not just the tissue but the correct limb, with the right proportions, stopping at exactly the right point. The body isn’t blindly regrowing… It has a target state it’s navigating toward and it knows when it’s arrived.
Transplanted tissue that ignores its origin. When scientists took a piece of tail tissue and grafted it onto an amputated hand, it didn’t grow into a tail. It grew into a hand. The cells read the context they were placed in and executed accordingly.
Eyes grown wherever scientists wanted. By decoding and rewriting the bioelectric signals in frog embryos, Levin’s team induced the growth of functional eyes in locations that have no business growing eyes, like on the gut or on the tail! The instruction was delivered not through DNA editing, but through electrical signals.
Cells switching voltage to match their neighbors. An isolated cell carrying one voltage, placed near a larger group carrying a different voltage, gradually abandoned its own signal and adopted the dominant one.
Each of these hit me in a different way. Together, they pointed at something even more powerful.
The First Insight: DNA Is the Library, Not the Program
This is the foundation everything else rests on.
We’ve been told that DNA is destiny. That our biology is a blueprint, fixed at conception, executing faithfully throughout our lives. Levin’s work blows this up.
What the experiments actually show is this:
DNA is the library of possible instructions. Bioelectric fields are the runtime environment that decides which instructions get executed, when, and how.
The frog cells that grew an eye on a tail? They had the same DNA as every other cell in that frog. What changed was the electrical signal they received. The genome contains the subroutine for “build an eye.” The bioelectric field triggered that subroutine in an unexpected location.
The implications for human beings are staggering: you are carrying instructions in your genome that have never been executed. Others that were executed early in life could, in principle, be modulated. Your DNA is not a sentence. It’s a vocabulary. What gets said depends on the electrical environment your cells are living in.
The Second Insight: Your Thoughts Are Issuing Biological Instructions
And this is where it got personal for me…
Thoughts are electrochemical events. They generate measurable electromagnetic fields. Your brain and heart both produce fields that extend beyond your skin — this is not controversial, it’s measurable physics.
If bioelectric signals can instruct a tail cell to become a hand, and can trigger eye growth in the gut of a frog, then the sustained electrical states we create through chronic thought patterns are not just psychological events. They are biological inputs.
This is what finally gave me a framework for things I’d always half-believed but never quite trusted:
- Chronic stress causing physical disease is not just “wear and tear.” It’s a sustained disruptive signal being issued to your cellular environment.
- Meditation and focused intention producing measurable physiological changes is not placebo mysticism. It’s a shift in the electrical environment your cells are operating in.
- Visualization, belief, and psychological safety influencing physical outcomes is not wishful thinking. It’s the runtime environment being reconfigured.
Your mind is not separate from your biology. Your mind is a bioelectric system, and it is constantly broadcasting instructions to the rest of you.
The Third Insight: The People Around You Are Reconfiguring Your Biology
This one reminded me of the age old saying that says “you’re the average of the 5 people you spend more time with”.
Remember the cell that switched voltage when placed near a dominant group? It didn’t choose to switch. It didn’t reason about it. It simply embraced to the dominant field.
Human beings generate electromagnetic fields. The heart’s field — the strongest in the body — extends several feet beyond the skin and is detectable by other people’s nervous systems. The HeartMath Institute has documented this.
Here’s what I think is happening:
Chronic exposure to people running a fundamentally different “signal” — different emotional states, different goal orientations, different levels of coherence — does not just affect your mood. It may be pulling your cellular environment toward their setpoint.
The voltage conformity experiment showed this at the cellular scale. The principle that a smaller signal entrains to a dominant surrounding field is not unique to biology — it’s physics. It appears in acoustics, electronics, neuroscience (neural synchrony), and now in developmental biology.
Choosing your environment carefully is not just “self-help advice”. It is a biological intervetion.
The Framework: The Bioelectric Matrix
So here’s how I’ve been putting all of this together. I’m calling it The Bioelectric Matrix — and yes, the Matrix reference is intentional.
In the movie, Neo kept feeling a signal long before he understood it. Something was wrong. Something was pulling at him. That signal eventually collapsed into a single question: what is the Matrix? That question is what led him to Morpheus. (I’ve written about this signal pull more in depth here.)
My nail biting was a signal. The feeling of having more potential but not being able to reach it was a signal. The question underneath both of them took me years to even formulate. Now I have language for it.
Four principles:
Principle 1: You Have a Target State
Your body — like every system Levin studies — is not drifting. It is navigating. There is a set point, a morphogenetic goal, encoded not just physically but somewhere beyond that…
Deviation from that target state generates a correction signal. We experience this as:
- Anxiety: the system detecting distance from the target and not knowing how to close it
- Depression: the system abandoning the attempt to close the gap
- Flow and meaning: active, successful navigation toward the target
The question this forces you to ask is: what is your target state? Not your goals list. Not your five-year plan. The configuration of the self you are trying to become. If that is undefined, your goal-seeking machinery runs anyway. It just adopts someone else’s target by default.
Principle 2: Your Genome Is Waiting for Instructions
You are not your current expression. You are the full library.
The epigenetic layer which is made of the bioelectric and biochemical environment that determines which genes are expressed, is malleable. It responds to thought, stress, nutrition, movement, sleep and social environment. You are not unlocking a fixed destiny. You are continuously selecting from a vast set of available instructions.
This completely reframes personal development. It’s not so much about forcing yourself to do certain things but aligning yourself with what your true inner self trully wants to become and do. Because you might choose to ignore the force of your inner self, felt and measured by the eletrical and biochemical signals, but you can’t escape it.
Principle 3: Your Internal State Is Your Primary Signal
If thoughts are electrical events issuing instructions to your biology, then the quality of your inner environment is the primary lever.
Chronic fear, resentment, purposelessness, and disconnection are not just unpleasant. They are sustained signals instructing your cellular environment toward a degraded configuration. Clarity, purpose, love, and creative engagement are not just nice feelings. They are instructions toward coherence.
This is why practices that shift internal state. Things like meditation, deep rest, meaningful work, physical training, genuine connection, they all produce physiological changes that go beyond what the activity alone would explain. The state is the signal.
Principle 4: Your Environment Is Co-Authoring Your Biology
The voltage conformity principle operating at the cellular level does not magically stop at the human level. The people you spend the most time with, the media you consume, the physical spaces you inhabit, they all of these contribute to the dominant field you are living inside.
You can do all the right internal work and still be losing ground if the surrounding field is pulling hard in the opposite direction. And you can accelerate dramatically by placing yourself inside a field that is already running the signal you’re trying to generate.
This is why mentors, communities and environments matter so much more than motivation.
Where to Go Deeper
If this resonates with you, here’s where I’d point you:
Start with the science:
- Watch Dr. Michael Levin’s talk “Against Mind Blindness” — it’s the clearest entry point into his thinking
- The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker (1985) — the foundational text on bioelectricity and regeneration
- Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert (1997) — the biochemical bridge between emotions and cellular biology
- The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton (2005) — Dr. Lipton’s core argument that the cell membrane responds to signals before the nucleus does, maps directly onto Levin’s bioelectric framework and makes the case that belief is a literal biological input, not a metaphor.
Then the epigenetics layer:
- The Developing Genome by David S. Moore — the clearest accessible book on epigenetics as runtime, not destiny
- Lifespan by David Sinclair — aging as information loss in the bioelectric program
Then the synthesis:
- Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake — decentralized intelligence and what it means for how we think about “self”
- HeartMath Institute research on electromagnetic field coherence between humans
One More Thing (this one is wild)
While I was finishing this article, I opened X and saw this:
Dr. Levin — 11 minutes earlier — had replied to a tweet saying that four completely different fields (mathematics, cognitive science, AI/ML, and linguistics) had independently arrived at the same picture: that intelligence is navigation of structured spaces.
I had spent an entire session building this framework rooted in his work, opened X mid-session, and there he was, live, responding to something that maps directly onto the mathematical structure of everything I’d been thinking about.
I’m not going to tell you the universe delivered that. But I do think this: when you’re fully immersed in work that’s genuinely yours and aligned with your true self, your radar changes. That’s what the reticular activating system, that I’ve heard first from Tony Robbins, comes into play. You notice things you’d have scrolled past the day before. You’re tuned to a different frequency.
A Final Thought
The lizard that regrows its arm doesn’t think about regrowing its arm. It doesn’t motivate itself, journal about it, or build a morning routine. It has a target state encoded so deeply that the system navigates back to it automatically, without confusion, without stopping too early or too late.
I think we are built the same way. The confusion, the drift, the distance from ourselves… that is not our nature. It is what happens when the signal gets disrupted: by the wrong environment, by unexamined thought patterns, by surrounding ourselves with fields that are pulling us somewhere we never chose to go.
The work of personal development, seen through this lens, is not self-improvement. It is signal restoration.
Finding your target state. Clearing the interference. Building an environment that entrains rather than corrupts. And trusting that the system — given the right conditions — knows exactly where it’s trying to go.
Neo’s question wasn’t “how do I fix myself?” It was what is the Matrix?
That question is what led him to Morpheus. Not a plan. Not a framework. A question he couldn’t ignore.
Maybe yours has been running in the background this whole time too.
This post is part of an ongoing series exploring the intersection of biology, cognition and deliberate self-development. The framework described here — The Bioelectric Matrix — is a work in progress. If it resonates, I’d love to hear from you
Credits & Sources
- Dr. Michael Levin, Tufts University — drmichaellevin.org
- Levin, M. (2021). Bioelectric signaling: Reprogrammable circuits underlying embryogenesis, regeneration, and cancer. Cell, 184(8)
- Lagasse, E., and Levin, M. (2023). Future Medicine: from molecular pathways to the collective intelligence of the body. Trends in Molecular Medicine
- Fields, C. & Levin, M. (2022). Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments. Entropy, 24(6), 819. https://doi.org/10.3390/e24060819
- Pert, C. (1997). Molecules of Emotion. Scribner
- Becker, R.O. (1985). The Body Electric. William Morrow
- HeartMath Institute — heartmath.org