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I agree with Evan's point that it is difficult to communicate what we know and have seen as a battery to what we know and have seen (under a microscope of course) of axons. For me it has been difficult to transform a battery from a small piece of metal, that DIES, to a more abstract definition of positive and negative fields, permeability, concentration gradients, random movement, and CONSTANT movement. Margaux's questions are similar to those that am still puzzling over. How do we recharge our batteries, and why does it seem that there are so many possibilities (myelin) for damage to our action potentials? What, if any, is the influence of excercise on action potentials and recharging?

I do not think that I can say I agree or disagree with the battery metphor, but more that I understand it more or less as we move through the reasoning. I have come to understand it more, but now I find myself forgetting what an action potential is doing. I've become lost in trying to understand the metaphor and have lost sight of the "bigger picture." Therefore, on the one hand the battery analogy has helped me understand an action potential, but my understanding of the system, that is our family of input output boxes, has not progressed.