Governing Behavior: How Nerve Cell Dictatorships and Democracies Control Everything We Do

From simple reflexes to complex choreographies of movement, all animal behavior is governed by a nervous system. But what kind of government is it—a dictatorship or a democracy?

Nervous systems consist of circuits of interconnected nerve cells (neurons) that transmit and receive information via electrical signals. Every moment, each neuron adds up stimulating and inhibiting inputs from many other neurons to determine whether to send an electrical signal to its recipients. Some circuits are d...