2 ms·
They emphasize the slowness of action potentials along axons. But electrical waves, which emerge as the collection of action potentials, move much faster. It’s
by dr_dshiv 2y ago
They emphasize the slowness of action potentials along axons.
But electrical waves, which emerge as the collection of action potentials, move much faster. It’s related to the volleying approach of neuronal populations: the cortex can phase lock to 1000+ hz sound waves, even though individual neurons can only fire <200hz. Populations of neurons have faster responses than single neurons. Electrical oscillations in large neuronal populations can create fast electrical activity (such as resonance phenomena) over a large distance.
- schmidtleonard 2y agoNone of these "faster than the constituent parts" phenomena can transmit information faster than the constituent parts, though.
- dr_dshiv 2y agoYes they can. Changes in an electrical field travels much faster than the chemical propagation. At the level of a neuron, the field change is weak. But many neurons can create a meaningful change in electrical field potential that propagates much faster than the action potentials.
- bgnn 2y agoMassive 3-d parallelism is underrated. Natural neural systems evolved to deal with special cases that require very fast response time via local reflexes which are trained very slowly. They are still in millisecond range. All the computation in the cerebral cortex doesn't need tp be fast. This is what we think it should be thinking the computers we build.