Reply to comment

I think the main reason that I have had difficulty thinking of action potentials as batteries is because the concept of the "battery" itself connotes a physical object that resides somewhere "within" the nervous system. The action potential as it exists however, is not technically an actual object which can be picked up the same way a battery can, however perhaps it is just the idea of what the battery does that is important in sustaining this analogy.

In thinking about the above, I also remembered something we talked about in class on tuesday-the idea that the action potential as a battery successively turns on and off moving along an axon. This description or belief, as I understood it, accounts for reaction times-but this suggests that action potentials are similar each time they are generated. What then, accounts for experience-for example, in Intro Bio we performed a lab that measured reaction times for certain activities, however I found that with practice over time, my reactions became "faster." Is there a relationship between the action potentials on the molecular level, and experience in the psychological or material sense?