🧠 Myelin is a fatty wrap that goes around some axons.

🔸 An unmylinated or naked axon can only transfer information at a slow rate. So the rate that it's transfers information is 0.2 to 1 meters per second.

🔸 Now, once we put on #myelin, information transfers much much faster. It can go between 2 and 120 meters per second. If it goes at 120 meters per second, the whole game is over. So very short time, imperceptible to us.

🔸 That information occurs in a 0 or a 1. There's either a point of information or not. **And so it's very much like a computer code**, where what we're seeing is a series of and what's important, the 0s are less important but the temporal pattern of these ones is very important.

🔸 And these 'ones' are actually an action potential, also called a spike. And we talk about firing spikes, neurons fire spikes. So, the timing of these spikes is what carries information.

🔸 The information spikes actually jump. That's what makes it so fast. They don't have to actually be carried through the places; with the #Myelin, they can actually jump.

🔸 And now, if we have a #DemyelinatingDisease, what we're going to end up with is some information that's spread out, because it's slower. And every once in a while, it's going to miss bits.

🔸 The neuron, that we're talking, to is getting a very incoherent message. This is very different from the original message and that is the problem with demyelination. Because axons are demyelinated, the information transfer is very degraded. It's a garbled message and that's a problem.

Image source: Screen-grab from https://www.coursera.org/learn/neurobiology/lecture/B13Z1/myelin.