Brain Cells Slicker Than We Thought

From New Scientist:

Rat brain cells waste little energy when talking to one another. That finding might not sound unusual, but it challenges the long-standing view that brain cells are extremely inefficient at sending signals.

In 1939, Alan Hodgkin of the University of Cambridge and Andrew Huxley of University College London experimented on nerve cells from the giant squid. They concluded that the energy of electrical signals sent along axons – the cells' "cables", each 1 millimetre in diameter in the giant squid – was four times the theoretical minimum.

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