How to Use action potential in a Sentence

action potential

noun
  • The heart and your guts both have action potential wavefronts that propagate through the tissue.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 22 July 2012
  • Once the charge threshold is reached, an action potential is triggered and the neuron discharges.
    — WIRED, 31 Oct. 2022
  • That may or may not result in a spike, or action potential, going out on the neuron’s axon to the dendrites of post-synaptic neurons.
    — Quanta Magazine, 18 Feb. 2021
  • That burst is what’s needed to create an acoustic compound action potential—a signal that travels down an auditory nerve.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 21 Nov. 2017
  • What’s the consequence of all the work required to generate an action potential in the postsynaptic neuron?
    — Gabriel A. Silva, Forbes, 19 Apr. 2021
  • In both brains, neurons fire action potentials, use common neurotransmitters, etc.
    — Tom Hawking, Popular Science, 2 Oct. 2024
  • The patients’ action potential duration shortened under the stress.
    — Grace Leslie, Scientific American, 18 Sep. 2021
  • Hedrich and his team found that the mutation did not seem to affect either the action potential or the underlying calcium signal in the first two-count stage of the process.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 27 Jan. 2023
  • Positive ions flow in, causing a voltage change within the neuron that triggers it to fire with an action potential (3) that travels down the axon.
    — Sangeeta S. Chavan, IEEE Spectrum, 9 June 2025
  • These branches receive molecular signals at one end of a neuron and induce the cell to rapidly fire an electrical charge that ripples down the cell body, known as an action potential.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 24 Apr. 2026
  • And the events at the synaptic terminals when the action potential reaches the end of the axon are completely different than what is taking place in either the dendrites or the axon.
    — Gabriel A. Silva, Forbes, 2 Aug. 2022
  • That hindered Miami’s play action potential, which led to Gesicki’s snap count being limited.
    — Omar Kelly, Miami Herald, 19 June 2024
  • That’s a language that neurons understand because [the flood of sodium ions] depolarizes a neuron and sends a signal called an action potential, which can then talk to the next neuron.
    — Tanya Lewis, Scientific American, 8 Oct. 2021
  • Each neuron in the brain receives somewhere in the range of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of action potential electrical signals from other neurons that connect into it.
    — Gabriel A. Silva, Forbes, 19 Apr. 2021
  • The crux of his argument is that, yes, our brains work through action potentials and neurotransmitters and other molecular phenomena.
    — Diana Gitig, Ars Technica, 12 Nov. 2023
  • This was noteworthy because conventional action potentials are usually caused by sodium and potassium ions.
    — Quanta Magazine, 14 Jan. 2020
  • These signals come in forms such as action potentials (resembling animal nerve cells, though slower) and variation potentials (often linked with stress responses).
    — Madison Dapcevich, Outside, 19 Nov. 2025
  • Animals need sodium for neurons to fire action potentials, for proteins to keep their shape and function, and for chemical reactions to occur inside cells — the everyday business of life.
    — Dan Samorodnitsky, Quanta Magazine, 11 Aug. 2025
  • An imbalance can cause brain cells to malfunction, losing their ability to manage ion concentrations across their membranes and propagate action potentials.
    — Dan Samorodnitsky, Quanta Magazine, 11 Aug. 2025
  • It was previously thought that encoding a place cell would take multiple action potentials, via Hebbian learning, which would require the animal to explore the same spot multiple times.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 24 Apr. 2026
  • Excitatory currents prompt one neuron to pass information on to the next through an action potential; inhibitory currents reduce the likelihood that information will be passed on.
    — New Atlas, 15 Oct. 2024
  • Neurons firing action potentials that affect the downstream cells they are wired to (via synapses) are one type of mechanism, as are electronic circuits, made of transistors, capacitances, resistances and wires.
    — Christof Koch, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2019
  • When neurons fire, action potentials – brief, high-voltage spikes traveling outward from their cell bodies – set up local electrical activity in other neurons, causing current to flow within and outside them.
    — Giridhar Kalamangalam, Discover Magazine, 4 Apr. 2024
  • The pressure information from the e-dermis is converted into neuron-like pulses that are similar to the spikes of electricity, or action potentials, that living neurons use to communicate.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 20 June 2018
  • Divide and Conquer The brain is a power-hungry organ; neurons are constantly sending each other information in the form of electrical pulses, known as spikes or action potentials.
    — Quanta Magazine, 23 Aug. 2016
  • By way of explanation, neurons communicate through electrical currents called action potentials, which can be excitatory or inhibitory.
    — New Atlas, 15 Oct. 2024
  • Huxley’s Nobel Prize winning work to understand the action potential - the basis for how neurons communicate with each other via discrete electrical impulses.
    — Gabriel A. Silva, Forbes, 27 May 2021
  • Improvement on the ground would figure to help quarterback Justin Herbert’s play-action potential and also boost the offense in the red zone, where the Chargers are scoring touchdowns on only 48% of their trips.
    — Los Angeles Times, 22 Oct. 2022
  • Glutamate triggers a bunch of positive ions to flood into a neuron, increasing its internal voltage and spurring it to fire an action potential, a strong burst of electricity that travels down a nerve fiber and makes the neuron release its own set of molecules to communicate with others, and so on.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 29 Sep. 2025
  • For much of the 20th century, neuroscientists believed that neurons performed the heavy lifting of producing conscious experience through a process called spiking, which involves transmitting a signal via an electrical impulse known as an action potential.
    — Big Think, 20 Aug. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'action potential.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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