• Practical neurology · Oct 2007

    Biography Historical Article

    Todd, Faraday and the electrical basis of brain activity.

    • Edward Reynolds.
    • Institute of Epileptology, King's College School of Medicine, Weston Education Centre, Denmark Hill Campus, Cutcombe Road, London SE5 6PJ, UK. reynolds@buckles.u-net.com
    • Pract Neurol. 2007 Oct 1;7(5):331-5.

    AbstractThe origins of our understanding of brain electricity and electrical discharges in epilepsy can be traced to Robert Bentley Todd (1809-60). Todd was influenced by his contemporary in London, Michael Faraday (1791-1867), who in the 1830 s and 1840 s was laying the foundations of our modern understanding of electromagnetism. Todd's concept of nervous polarity, generated in nerve vesicles and transmitted in nerve fibres (neurons in later terminology), was confirmed a century later by the Nobel Prize-winning work of Hodgkin and Huxley, who demonstrated the ionic basis of neuro-transmission, involving the same ions which had had been discovered by Faraday's mentor, Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829).

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