Conventional wisdom of how neurons operate challenged: Axons can work in reverse
Saturday, February 19, 2011 - 11:30
in Biology & Nature
Neurons are complicated, but the basic functional concept is that synapses transmit electrical signals to the dendrites and cell body, and axons carry signals away. In one of many surprise findings, scientists have discovered that axons can operate in reverse: they can send signals to the cell body, too. They also found axons can talk to each other and that neural computations performed in axons are thousands of times slower than those occurring in dendrites.