Is Red Light Therapy Tuning Into the Brain's Inner Light Language
- May 15, 2025
- 4 min read
Sarah Turner is the Founder of CeraThrive, a wellness company specialising in photobiomodulation and its impact on the gut-brain connection. With a background in neuroscience and biohacking, Sarah is dedicated to advancing innovative therapies that optimise health, longevity, and performance.
We tend to picture the brain as an electric maze neurons firing, chemicals floating about, and synapses sparking. But what if that’s only part of the story? Emerging science suggests that our brains and indeed our bodies may also communicate using light. Actual, measurable light.
This isn’t a poetic metaphor or woo-woo. It’s about biophotons faint flashes of light emitted by living cells. Long dismissed as metabolic noise, these ultra-weak photon emissions are now being looked at through a different lens, especially in light of recent advances in red light therapy, or photobiomodulation (PBM).
A brief history of living light
The idea that biological systems emit light isn’t new. In the 1920s, Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch proposed something he called mitogenetic radiation ultraviolet light emitted by cells that he believed could influence cell division. The idea was widely dismissed for decades.
Then came Fritz-Albert Popp, a German biophysicist, who in the 1970s took the concept further. He confirmed that cells emit photons in the UV to visible light range, and he believed this light was not random but coherent, a term more often associated with lasers than biology. Popp proposed that these photons might serve as a communication system within and between cells, helping to organise biological processes.
I met Popp in 2009, during his research into light emissions from plants. He spoke about biophotons as if they were the hidden language of life itself signals from cell to cell, orchestrating the body’s activities with an elegance far beyond mere chemistry.
Another key influence I was also lucky enough to meet and talk with was Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a maverick British biophysicist. She saw the body not as a bag of chemicals but as a liquid crystalline matrix—a shimmering network where light could flow freely. Her work argued that coherence in biophoton emissions might be the glue holding life together.
The fascia in our bodies is a continuous web of connective tissue and extracellular matrix that extends throughout the body. It’s often dismissed as biological scaffolding, but in Ho’s and others’ work, it’s more like biological fibre-optic cable. This fibre-optic property could also be true of microtubules and axon fibres. There are ways to transport light.
The body might be using photons to send rapid messages over long distances bypassing or complementing the nervous system.
So, the question arises: if we emit, and perhaps use, light to communicate internally, what happens when we introduce external light into the system?
Photobiomodulation
Red light therapy typically uses wavelengths in the red and near-infrared spectrum (around 600-1000 nm). Its documented effects include:
Enhancing mitochondrial activity (boosting cellular energy production),
Reducing oxidative stress,
Improving blood flow and tissue repair,
Supporting brain function in depression, dementia, and traumatic injury.
But there’s a deeper layer worth considering.
Some researchers suggest that red light therapy might do more than just stimulate mitochondria. It could be entraining or influencing our own biophoton emissions bringing disorganised or low-level light signalling back into coherence. In other words, PBM might be acting like a tuning fork for the body’s light-based communication system.
What could this mean for the brain?
The brain is an electrically excitable, densely networked organ that also emits biophotons, most strongly in the near-UV and visible spectrum. There’s early evidence suggesting that these emissions may not be random but correlate with mental states, cognitive tasks, and even consciousness itself.
If connective tissue within the brain (glial cells, myelin sheaths, extracellular matrix) can act as light conductors, then photonic signalling might:
Support long-range communication across brain regions,
Influence neuroplasticity,
Play a role in memory, mood regulation, or even sleep cycles.
This is highly speculative but it’s not science fiction. Peer-reviewed studies are beginning to explore how external light might interact with internal photonic systems, particularly in the context of neurological health.
Why it matters
While most research into red light therapy still focuses on mitochondrial mechanisms, this photonic angle opens a new and fascinating line of inquiry. If light is indeed a fundamental signalling tool in the brain and body, then PBM could be far more than a metabolic booster. It could be rebalancing a subtle, light-based system that science is only beginning to understand.
And that makes red light therapy not just therapeutic, but potentially revolutionary. This is true Rebel Science by Rebel Scientists a bold approach to scientific discovery where researchers challenge conventional wisdom and established paradigms to explore radical new ideas, all while maintaining rigorous scientific methods. And it seems like some of these findings are now being rediscovered.
We truly are beings of light.
Sarah Turner, CEO CeraThrive and Red Light Therapy Expert
Sarah Turner is the founder of CeraThrive, a company advancing wellness through photobiomodulation and its impact on the gut-brain connection. With a background in neuroscience and biohacking, she is passionate about exploring innovative therapies to optimise health and performance. Sarah also co-hosts the "Rebel Scientist" podcast, where she explores cutting-edge topics in wellness and longevity.
References:
Photobiomodulation Therapy on Brain: Pioneering an Innovative Approach for Neurological and Psychological Disorders. Theranostics, 2024.
Recent Advances in Photobiomodulation Therapy for Brain Diseases. Journal of Biophotonics, 2023.
Do Biophotons Play Any Role in Transcranial Photobiomodulation of the Brain? Photobiomodulation, Photomedicine, and Laser Surgery, 2022.
Electromagnetic Radiation and Biophoton Emission in Neuronal Communication. Progress in Brain Research, 2024.
The Effect of Photobiomodulation on the Brain During Wakefulness and Sleep. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2022.
Advances in Photobiomodulation for Cognitive Improvement by Near-Infrared Light. Translational Medicine, 2023.
Photobiomodulation Devices and Research (including Long COVID). MedCram, 2024.
Biophotons: A Hard Problem. Applied Sciences, 2024.
