The NEURONS and NEURAL SYSTEM: a 21st CENTURY PARADIGM This material is excerpted from the full β-version of the text. The final printed version will be more concise due to further editing and economical constraints. A Table of Contents and an index are located at the end of this paper. A few citations have yet to be defined and are indicated by “xxx.” James T. Fulton Neural Concepts
[email protected] August 1, 2016 Copyright 2011 James T. Fulton 2 Neurons & the Nervous System [xxx consider connexon, connexons instead of conexus, conexuses ] 2 The Functional Configuration of the Basic Neuron 1 Notice: The Coursera organization has recently begun offering free courses claimed to be at the college level. The course entitled “Computational Neuroscience” by two little known instructors, Adrienne Fairhall, Rajesh P. N. Rao2, from the University of Washington is based on the literature repeating endlessly the state of the art in the cytology of the cell and neurons from the first half of the 20th Century–specifically prior to the dawn of semiconductor physics, the discovery of the transistor, and the more recent discovery of the biological transistor. The latter is now in commercial use in organic light emitting device screens in cellphones and even television monitors. The existence of the biological transistor, a three-terminal device, totally deprecates the two terminal device, based on the Hodgkin-Huxley conceptual explanation of their totally empirical experiments, that is the basis of the course. The following material is in no way compatible with that new telecourse (May 2013). No further discussion of the telecourse except to point out that it remains possible to obtain a PhD in computational neuroscience without having demonstrated any detailed knowledge of how the neuron actually works.