How neurons really work is being elucidated

A neuron is a thing of beauty. Ever since Santiago Ramón y Cajal stained them with silver nitrate to make them visible under the microscopes of the 1880s (see drawing above), their ramifications have fired the scientific imagination. Ramón y Cajal called them the butterflies of the soul. Your browser does not support the audio element. Those ramifications--dendrites by the dozen to collect incoming signals, called action potentials, from other neurons, and a single axon to pass on the summed wisdom of those signals in the form of another action potential, turn neurons into parts of far bigger structures known as neural networks.