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Nerve conduction velocity

PhysiologyInformation theory

The speed at which a nerve impulse travels along an axon. A nerve impulse is not electricity flowing through copper at nearly three hundred thousand kilometres a second; it is a slow chemical cascade, ions pumping across a membrane, regenerating itself step by step along the axon. The fastest, fattest, most heavily myelinated nerves in the human body - the ones built for emergency reflexes - manage perhaps 120 metres per second; the bare, slow ones crawl at 1 metre per second, walking pace. The ceiling is set by chemistry, not engineering - and is a hard constraint on any "electrochemical" network like Eywa.

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