Neurons will always be firing at some low level background rate, in biology I think the focus is more on the rate of fire than on individual spikes, and as far

Neurons will always be firing at some low level background rate, in biology I think the focus is more on the rate of fire than on individual spikes, and as far as I remember if that's all a neuron ever does it will indeed atrophy. The best book on the subject for me is "How Brains Make Up Their Minds" by Walter J. Freeman, not only is it a short book which explains the real observed activity of neurons, but it is also backed up by an extremely strong vein of philosophy for meaningful interpreting the observations.