The whole process seems a bit bonkers. Your brain went to all that effort to make a spike—a process that costs a lot of energy—to get around the fact that sending messages long distance can’t be done just by dumping molecules or spreading flickers of voltage. And then it turns the spike back into dumped molecules, which cause flickers of voltage. There are good reasons for doing this. For example, spreading voltage and chemistry are much cheaper in terms of energy—in tiny brains, everything is sent by spreading voltage and diffusing molecules, not spikes. But perhaps the key reason is
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