The magic of ion channels in the neurons

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I sometimes wonder if the phrase "they are an egg head" is not so much to do with baldness but more to do with knowledge and intelligence. Phosphatidylcholine (aka Lecithin found in Egg Yolk and elsewhere - 4 egg yolks a day to meet RDA levels) can do wonders for your cell membranes and Vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid) does wonders for your myelin sheaths. I'd be surprised if F1 drivers & fighter pilots werent supplementing above RDA levels with these. Using Potassium Chloride (sometimes called the good salt) helps one to relax in the evening, and sodium chloride as a pick me up in the morning. I wonder if this neuronal ion exchange is anything like the Sodium - Potassium ATPase pump found in other cells as they seem similar. Life is just a complex real-time chemical reaction.

For the Nobel winning work on this from long ago, I heartily recommend:

  Hodgkin, A. L. (1958). The Croonian Lecture: Ionic Movements and Electrical Activity in Giant   Nerve Fibres. Biological Sciences, 148(930), 1–37. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/83088

This contains my absolute favorite figure caption ever:

A fresh and lively squid was taken out of the aquarium and immobilized by cutting the nerves connecting the head with the stellate ganglion. The mantle was opened ventrally by a single cut and was spread out under cooled oxygenated sea water in a transparent dish. Using a motor car headlamp to illuminate the animal and a binocular microscope to watch the penetration,...

in response to ~ what is reference with respect to resting potential [deleted]

the extracellular environment is the reference of 0mV

typically a differential amplifier is used to measure voltage potential across a cellular membrane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_amplifier