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While it’s hard to fathom that there are so many transmissions of action potentials running at one time in my body, I do understand the whole process of the transmission.  The analogy of a battery was interesting to me, because I hadn’t thought of a concentration gradient with charge in that sort of fashion – but, it did make more sense.

At the end of class, we began talking about how propagation could go either way.  The three stages of the sodium channels provided that the propagation channels did significantly move only one way, but I wonder, are there ever cases when sodium channels fail and propagation does go both ways?  What is the resulting “output” of this skewed action potential?  Perhaps this could relate more-so to explaining things like epilepsy or other seizure disorders that are caused by the nervous system going a little “haywire.”  Maybe membranes disallowing some ions to permeate when, in reality, the ions should be entering into the system.