Talk:Electrotonic potential

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Untitled

a) The beginning of the second line which says: "Neurons which are small in relation to their length..." seems confusing. Isn't a short neuron also small?

Length compared to 'action potential' article.

How come the 'Action potential' article, which is related, is way more bigger than the 'Electrotonic potential' article?

Action potential — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mbb1056 (talk • contribs) 17:47, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Electrotonic CONDUCTION: ions 'bouncing' against adjacent ions ?

I've seen the term electrotonic CONDUCTION used to describe the graded flow of an input signal along a neurons dendrite & soma, and it seems to me that this flow is sort of like a row of very close but not-quite-touching billiard balls being hit at one end, each being moved a little bit & then hitting & moving the next one, resulting in a ball at the end of the row moving relatively quickly, while the whole row does NOT 'flow' on & on continuously like an electric current. In the neuron at a dendrite in receipt of a signal, the resulting influxing ions electric fields might force nearby similarly charged ions already in the neuron to move away from them a tad, which makes ions near them move a tad, etc, along the dendrite away from the synapse, with each ions move diminishing in travel distance because of the viscosity of the cytoplasm, thus 'degrading' or weakening the strength of the signal as the distance from the input increases. The result would be that sequential very small moves in a 'chain' of ions within a dendrite & soma cause a momentary & rapid 'pile-up' of ions at the end of the chain, the axon hillock. The original influxed ions don't REACH the axon hillock, they just push against a sequence of ions, one against the next, until the ones near the axon hillock 'pile-up' there. Is this view reasonable/accurate? And if not, what's a better conceptualization of electrotonic conduction?UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 09:45, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

I did find that ion leakage channels are probably what causes the degrading of the signal strength, but my original question about the nature of the movement of the signal electrotonically still seems resonable.UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 06:10, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

I think you're basically right, but this really comes down to the fundamental nature of electrical conduction, which is probably not a topic that this article should take on.

Thank you. But I'm trying to get a handle on the electrotonic conduction in the neuron, in relation to the nature of the ions occasioning & participating in it, not electrical conduction, as in the densely packed electrons in a metal etc. Electrical conduction (Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity) is described as moving at the speed of light in metals, working similar to Newtons_cradle, which I don't think describes electrotonic conduction at all. I can see how the action_potential propagates in the axon, so I'd like to be sure I understand the neurons companion signal conduction in the dendrite (and presumably under myelinated sections of the axon as well), electrotonic conduction.UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 19:23, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, in the immediately above and too often I keep forgetting that electrotonic conduction is actually just a specific kind of electrical conduction, which generally 'involves the movement of electrically charged particles through a transmission medium', and isn't something absolutely different. But I still think that a description in the wiki of the nature of the movement of the ions which constitute that electrotonic conduction is nonetheless warranted, as long as it's accurate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by UnderEducatedGeezer (talk • contribs) 10:32, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm re-reading the article, and it seems very clear & helpful. But a confusion I still have is that the sentence, "Because the ionic charge enters in one location and dissipates to others, losing intensity as it spreads, electrotonic spread is a graded response." makes very good sense to me in terms of explaining the movement of a signal in a dendrite or maybe more particularly across the soma, but 'graded' seems to be used by many others as rather either a variation due to a variation in the strength of the input, or in the number of inputs (see: graded potential). Is there anything you could say about that? UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 05:09, 11 March 2016 (UTC)