In 1958 Becker started research on how growth and healing are controlled. While investigating a clinical problem of muscle weakness, he measured slowly changing electrical signals on the skin of his patients, which he concluded were the sign of internal electric currents. This work led to studies on salamanders in which he found that they exhibited a pattern of measurable electrical signals on the skin that corresponded to the anatomic structure of the nervous system, suggesting to him that the signals originated in nerves. Working with salamanders, which naturally regenerate missing limbs, and frogs, which do not, he found important differences between the two species in the duration and polarity of the electrical signals in animals that had undergone surgical amputations, suggesting that the internal flow of electrical energy played a major role in the healing process. He found that the energy flow along peripheral nerves in salamanders could be altered by applying a magnetic field and by sectioning the nerves, suggesting that the flow was mediated by the movement of electrons rather than ions.

Becker found a neural-related pattern of electrical signals on the surface of the human body, paralleling the link he had seen in salamanders, and he measured changes in the signals from subjects in certain reduced-attention states including sleep and anesthesia. He also found that the signals varied with changes in consciousness induced by hypnosis. He raised the possibility that the signals were directly related to the controlling mechanism that mediated the various cognitive states.

In a four-year study, using data on magnetic storms collected by government agencies, he found a correlation between admissions to psychiatric wards and changes in the earth’s magnetic field, suggesting the possibility of the geomagnetic field’s influence on human behavior.

He took these collective results as evidence of the working of a biocybernetic control system, separate from the well-known nerve-impulse system, that regulated healing and growth processes and mediated the link between living systems and the environment.