Neurons as electrical and chemical devices.
11 topics · 17 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
2-Minute Neuroscience: Action Potential
Marc Dingman (Neuroscientifically Challenged) · 2015
A short animated walkthrough of depolarisation, threshold and repolarisation aimed at a reader meeting the action potential for the first time.
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Structure and Connexions of Neurons
Santiago Ramón y Cajal · 1906
Cajal's Nobel lecture lays out the neuron doctrine from his own histological work, describing neurons as discrete, polarised cells rather than a…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Action Potentials Recorded from Inside a Nerve Fibre
Alan Hodgkin & Andrew Huxley · 1939
Reports the first intracellular recording of a nerve impulse, showing the action potential overshoots zero rather than merely abolishing the resting…
+9 more at this level
12 of 17 works
Marc Dingman (Neuroscientifically Challenged)
A short animated walkthrough of depolarisation, threshold and repolarisation aimed at a reader meeting the action potential for the first time.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Cajal's Nobel lecture lays out the neuron doctrine from his own histological work, describing neurons as discrete, polarised cells rather than a continuous reticulum.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Julius Axelrod
Axelrod's Nobel lecture describes his discovery that reuptake into the presynaptic terminal, not enzymatic breakdown, is the principal way a synapse switches off noradrenaline signalling.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alfred Gilman
Gilman's Nobel lecture describes his discovery of G proteins as the molecular switch coupling a hormone receptor to adenylyl cyclase, explaining how one second-messenger enzyme can be regulated by many different receptors.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Eric Kandel
Kandel's Nobel lecture ties short- and long-term memory to reversible and gene-expression-dependent phases of synaptic strengthening, worked out first in the sea slug Aplysia.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ben Barres
Argues glia are active partners in neural computation and disease rather than passive support tissue, reviewing evidence that astrocytes and microglia actively sculpt synapses.
link checked 17 Sept 2026R. Douglas Fields
Argues that myelination continues to change with experience well into adulthood, making white matter plasticity a candidate mechanism for learning rather than a fixed scaffold laid down in youth.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alan Hodgkin & Andrew Huxley
Reports the first intracellular recording of a nerve impulse, showing the action potential overshoots zero rather than merely abolishing the resting potential as had been assumed.
Alan Hodgkin & Bernard Katz
Shows the rising phase of the action potential depends on external sodium, establishing the sodium hypothesis of membrane excitability that Hodgkin and Huxley later formalised mathematically.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alan Hodgkin & Andrew Huxley
Models the action potential with differential equations that predicted it quantitatively before the channels were known.
45 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026José del Castillo & Bernard Katz
Shows the end-plate potential is built from discrete, uniform quanta of neurotransmitter rather than continuously graded release, founding quantal theory of synaptic transmission.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Timothy Bliss & Terje Lømo
The founding demonstration that a brief burst of high-frequency stimulation leaves a synapse durably stronger, giving long-term potentiation as a candidate cellular substrate of memory.
link checked 17 Sept 2026