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

Hideo Hasegawa

Published 2011-06-29Version 1

In a recent paper [A. Moujahid, A. d'Anjou, F. J. Torrealdea and F. Torrealdea, Phys. Rev. E {\bf 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 {\it 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 {\it positive} energy consumed in an HH neuron, presenting some model calculations which are compared to those in their paper.