Basically, a postsynaptic neuron adds together, or integrates, all of the excitatory and inhibitory inputs it receives and “decides” whether to fire an action potential.

For the purposes for our discussion here, we’ll talk about the synapse as if it is between only two neurons, but we’ll keep at the back of our heads that a single neuron can affect many post-synaptic …

Most of your synapses are chemical synapses, meaning that information is carried by chemical messengers from one neuron to the next. In the article on synapses, we discussed how synaptic …

How one neuron can stimulate (or inhibit) another neuron at a chemical synapse. Created by Sal Khan.

Action potentials (those electrical impulses that send signals around your body) are nothing more than a temporary shift (from negative to positive) in the neuron’s membrane potential caused by ions …

Hyperpolarization is when the membrane potential becomes more negative at a particular spot on the neuron’s membrane, while depolarization is when the membrane potential becomes less negative …

When neurons communicate, they actually don't connect to each other directly, there's a junction in between called the synapse. So we have a pre-synaptic neuron, which is a neuron leading up to the …

It differentiates between two types of synapses: chemical and electrical. It also explains the role of the synaptic cleft, presynaptic and postsynaptic membranes, and neurotransmitters in this process. The …

Neuron-to-neuron connections are made onto the dendrites and cell bodies of other neurons. These connections, known as synapses, are the sites at which information is carried from the first neuron, …

Neurotransmitters are released from the presynaptic neuron in vesicles that travel across the synaptic cleft where they are received by receptors on the postsynaptic neuron.