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Updated: Apr 18, 2026

Induction of an Isoelectric Brain State to Investigate the Impact of Endogenous Synaptic Activity on Neuronal Excitability In Vivo
Published on: March 31, 2016
A new work mechanism on neuronal activity
Rubin Wang1, Ichiro Tsuda, Zhikang Zhang
1Institute for Cognitive Neurodynamics, School of Science, East China University of Science and Technology, Meilong Road 130, Shanghai 200237, P. R. China , School of Information Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Meilong 130, Shanghai 200237, P. R. China , Research Institute for Electronic Science, Hokkaido University, N12 W7 Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan 001-0012, Japan.
Abstract:
By re-examining the neuronal activity energy model, we show the inadequacies in the current understanding of the energy consumption associated with neuron activity. Specifically, we show computationally that a neuron first absorbs and then consumes energy during firing action potential, and this result cannot be produced from any current neuron models or biological neural networks. Based on this finding, we provide an explanation for the observation that when neurons are excited in the brain, blood flow increases significantly while the incremental oxygen consumption is very small. We can also explain why external stimulation and perception emergence are synchronized. We also show that negative energy presence in neurons at the sub-threshold state is an essential reason that leads to blood flow incremental response time in the brain rather than neural excitation to delay.
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