Modern Discoveries in Neuroscience... And What They Reveal About You (Collection)

13. How brains seem to work

To go back to the beginning, the foundation for thinking about the nervous system when I was a first-year medical student in 1960 was primarily knowledge about nerve cells and neural signaling based on work that Hodgkin, Huxley, Kuffler, Katz, and their collaborators had carried out during the preceding decades. This seminal body of research had led to a good, if incomplete, understanding of how action potentials carry information in the nervous system and how chemical synaptic transmission conveys this information from one neuron to another. Although a wealth of important detail about these processes has been added since, this basic understanding of neural function remains much the same as when I first learned it. ...