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After Thursday’s class, I understand the battery analogy much better. I think what helped me to understand it better was once what Prof. Grobstein finally explained what he meant by a battery (as a difference in voltage across a membrane), the rest of the analogy was quick to pick up. I think when the battery metaphor was initially proposed, I looked at it in the same way that a battery (like in a flashlight) worked, and I struggled trying to understand that because there is a rather steady charge maintained within a membrane while the membrane is at rest. For the battery I assumed that there was a positive end that connected to the negative end, and that was how the action potential was carried down the axon.

I agree with Zoe’s comment about how this fits in exactly with what we started with of the input output boxes. It feels as if we have abandoned what we discussed the first weeks of class. I am interested to see how these two analogies will be tied together. I would like to see this before we go into discussing various diseases and their effect on the nervous system.