Research has shown that applying 5 to 15 volts of electricity for 50 ms to the segmental nerve that innervates the light organ leads to a glow 1.5 seconds after that lasts for five to ten seconds. Stimulation of the segmental nerve has been found to lead to several different nerve impulses, and frequency of nervous impulses has been found to be proportional to the intensity of the stimulus applied. A high frequency of nervous impulse was found to lead to a constant latency. The light organ is inactive in the absence of nerve impulses. Constant nerve signaling was shown to coincide with constant emission of light from the light organ with a higher frequency coinciding with a higher amplitude of light emitted up to 30 impulses per second. Impulses beyond this frequency were not found to be associated with a more intense glow. The fact that the frequency of nerve impulses was able to exceed beyond the maximum intensity of light emission suggests some limitations in the mechanism either arising from the synapse or the cell's light producing process.   Additionally, a series of action potentials have been shown to lead to the sporadic, discontinuous emission to light. It was also found that a higher frequency of action potentials lead to a higher likelihood of any emission of light. Nerve impulses are associated with a depolarization of the photocyte which plays a role in its light emitting mechanism, and greater depolarization events were found to be associated with more intense lightning. The nerve innervating the light organ containing photocytes has only two axons, but they branch repeatedly allowing the numerous photocytes to be innervated with each cell being associated with several nerve terminals with each terminal possibly being associated with several synapses.
It was found that the junction between at the end of the neuron innervating the light organ differs from the kind of junction found between two different neurons or between neurons and muscles in the neuromuscular junction. The depolarization of the photocyte following nervous stimulation was found to be one-hundred times slower than the with the other two kinds of junctions and this slow response cannot be attributed to the rate of diffusion because the synapse between the neuron and photocyte is relatively small. It has been found that the neurons that control the light mechanism terminate at the tracheal cells rather than the photocytes themselves.