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Nelly Khaselev's picture

I dont get the punch line!

Submitted by Nelly Khaselev on Fri, 02/22/2008 - 10:10am.
On Thursday’s class, we answered all our questions about 'the batter'. What is a battery? How does a battery occur? Change? Propagate? And more...and at the end we generally agreed we are happy with 'the battery' theory to explain action potentials and in return behavior. We discovered how an action potential can start and stop on its own, via leaky regions on the membrane (where the membrane is highly permeably to sodium ions regardless of voltage) and a threshold. So if action potentials can start with no stimulus, then how do we still have controlled behavior – at least somewhat controlled? I just don’t get it… Leaky regions produce unpredictable action potential. However, i'd like to say we do have some predictable behavior. I just can't seem to rap my head around this....

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