The process of nervous conduction, then, was the movement of the impulse from cell to cell. There wasn’t a single, reticular spiderweb of “cellular appendages,” as Golgi had proposed, or a syncytium of citizen cells, as in the heart. Rather, nerve cells “chattered” with each other—collecting inputs (via dendrites) and generating outputs (via the axon). And it was this cellular chatter—or rather, intercellular chatter—that gave rise to the profound properties of the nervous system: sentience, sensation, consciousness, memory, thinking, and feeling.
