Comment on "Energy and information in Hodgkin-Huxley neurons"

Original · EN

In a recent paper [A. Moujahid, A. d'Anjou, F. J. Torrealdea and F. Torrealdea, Phys. Rev. E 83, 031912 (2011)], the authors have calculated the energy consumed in firing neurons by using the Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) model. The energy consumption rate adopted for the HH model yields a negative energy consumption meaning an energy transfer from an HH neuron to a source which is physically strange, although they have interpreted it as a biochemical energy cost. I propose an alternative expression for the power consumption which leads to a positive energy consumed in an HH neuron, presenting some model calculations which are compared to those in their paper.