Okay, so we just learned a ton about neural communication but we're going to take a second to step back and think about the actual scale of what is happening here because we always teach neural communication as if one neuron is talking to one neuron, but it's of course much more complicated than that. In reality, neurons can be receiving signals from 100, if not 1,000 of other neurons simultaneously, and those signals that are coming in can be excitatory, inhibitory, or both. We could be getting any combination of excitatory and inhibitory messages. So, what's going to happen is if the excitatory messages outweigh the inhibitory ones, that is when we're going to have an action potential and we're going to get neural communication. We obviously could not draw thousands of neurons, it would look like a mess, but we have 3 neurons here communicating with our neuron and as you can see, 2 of them are sending excitatory messages and one of them is sending an inhibitory message.

And so what's going to happen here is our neuron is hanging out, sitting pretty at negative 70 millivolts; it's resting, but then these incoming excitatory messages are going to bump our voltage up to the negative 55 threshold. Boom, that is going to fire an action potential that will travel down our neurons sped up by that myelin down to the axon terminal into the terminal button. When it hits the terminal button, we're going to be releasing neurotransmitters across the synapse in order to pass this excitatory message on to our neighboring neurons. This entire process is taking milliseconds, and it is happening on a scale of millions, if not billions, of neurons simultaneously. Very, very cool to actually think about that.

Right? Alright. So great job with these lessons, you guys, and I will see you in our next video. Bye-bye.