Module B Flashcards
What are the common features of somatosensory receptors that sense the environment?
Contains 3 neurons - Primary afferent , secondary afferent and tertiary afferent
Decussation and include a thalamic nucleus
What are the 3 neurons in somatosensory pathways?
Primary afferent - psuedounipolar neuron with a peripheral axon that innervates on receptor and a central process that synapses with a secondary neurons
Secondary neurons - synapse with a tertiary neuron in the thalamus
Tertiary - synapses with neurons in the cerebral cortex
Describe decussation
Can occur in the spinal cord or brain stem. Allows better separation of tracts - decussated arrangement one more robust against wiring errors than simpler same-sided wiring schemes.
Describe a mechanoreceptor
Sensory receptor that responds to mechanical pressure or distortion leads to pressure sensitive action potential.The different types for them allow for perception of different sensation and sensitivity. Can either be capsulated or incapsulated.
Which cells are the only mechanorecptors in the skin?
Merkel cells
What are free nerve endings for?
Touch pressure and stretching
What are Ruffini corpuscles?
detect tension deep in the skin
What are merkel cells and tactile discs?
detect sustained touch and pressure sensitive to fine touch
What areTactile corpuscles?
Detect light touch movement, vibration and changes in intensity
What are lamellated corpuscles?
Detect deep pressure. most sensitive to rapid vibration
Describe slow adaptation of somatosensory receptors
Produced sustained response to stat stimulation. slow to return to normal firing - tonic
Useful for detecting touch and pressure
Describe rapid adaptation of somatosensory receptors
Produce transient response. quick to return to normal firing - Phasic
Using for sensing such things as texture and vibration
What is a receptive field?
Areas that need an accurate taction (sense of touch) have mechanoreceptors with small accurate receptive fields e.g. fingertips have merkel cells and tactile corpuscles. This leads to 2 point discrimination
What is proprorecption
has both conscious (awareness of body position, control of voluntary movement) and unconscious (righting reflex) components In order to control movement the neurons system must receive continuous feedback from muscles/joints and there are nerve endings to control this.
What is a golgi tendon organ?
A proprioreceptor that monitors tension pressure/joint movement
What is neuromuscluar spindle?
Detect rate and size of changes in length of the muscle. Generate supra spinal responses to control muscle contraction and spinal reflexes
What are nocioreceptors?
Free nerve endings in large receptive fields. Pain is sensed by a number of parts of the brain.
Sensory discriminative allows detection of location and intensity and quality of pain. Receptors have small sensory field. Affective motivational - the fear, anxiety associated with pain
what types of nerve fibres are mechanoreceptors innervated by?
Abeta and Aomega
What types of nerve fibres are proprireceptors inenrvated by?
Aalpha and Abeta
What are the best myelinated receptors?
proprioreceptors
What is a dermatome?
Primary afferent collect to forma a posterior root to enter the cord. The area innervated by a single posterior root is the sum of the receptor fields of the primary afferents.
What is sensory modality segregation of somatosensory tracts?
Fibres are arranged according to information carried
What is the somatotopic arrangement segregation of somatosensory tracts?
Fibres are arranged according to the site of origin
What is the medial-lateral segragation of somatosensory tracts?
Inferior nerves travel more medially
What do the neurons of the dorsal column-medial lemniscus tract do?
first order - axons enter spinal cord through dorsal root and ascend fasiculus gracialsis (below T6) or cuneatus (above T6)
Second order - From the nuclei grascilis and cuneatus, axons travel up medial lemniscus to synaps in thalamus (VPL)
Third order neurons - Axons carry info to the primary sensory cortex
What do the neurons of the spinothalamic tracts do?
first order neurons - axons enter spinal cord the dorsal root and synapses in the dorsal horn
Second order neurons - Cross to the opposite side of the cord and ascend the appropriate spinothalamic tract to the thalamus
Third order - axons carry info to primary sensory cortex
What is the purpose of the spinocerebellar tract?
Conveys unconscious proprioreceptive information to the cerebellum. Important to central muscle contraction for movement. Posterior tract - carries info from lower limb and body. Anterior tract - integrates proprioreceptor information with descending inputs.
What are the neurons in the spinocerebellar tract?
First order neurons - Axons enter spinal cord though dorsal root and synapse in the dorsal horn
Second order neurons - post spinocerebellar tract afferents synapse in Clarkes nucleus then ascend to the cerebellum via the inferior cerebrall peduncle
Anterior spinocerebellar tract. Primary afferents synapse with the spinal border cells, decussate then travel to cerebellum via the superior cerebellar peduncle.
What do spinal border cells do?
Integrate information from lower limb, descending inputs and form reflexes
Is vision trivariant or bivariant?
Trivariant
which cones sense red?
long wave length (L) peak at 565nm
Which cones sense blue?
short wavelength (S) peak at 440nm
Which cones sense green?
Middle wavelength (M) peak at 545
Rods
night vision only. Low light threshold. do not detect colour
Cones
day vision, colour vision, cone photoreceptors, higher threshold to light. Only activated if rods are saturated
What is hue?
related to wavelength or dominant wave length
What is value?
reflectance and luminosity
What is chroma?
The saturation of the signal
What is the trichromatic theory?
The theory by Thomas Young and Hemholtz that a combination of three channels describes colour discriminate functions
What is the opponent colour theory?
a theory by Hering that says there are three channels red-green, blue-yellow and black-white. that respond in an antagonist way so theres never a greenish red.
What is stage theory?
modern model of normal vision that has two stages.
The receptor stage consists of the three photopigments.
the neural processing stages where colour opponency occurs. This is at a post receptoral level and occurs as early as the horizontal cell in the retina.
What is the other name for colour blindness?
Dichromacy
What are the forms of colour blindness?
protanopia - less sensitive to red
deuteranopia - less sensitive to green
monochromats
What is the Farnsworth panel?
The colour blindness test where you rearrange the colours
What is the ishihara test?
The colour blindness test where you look for the coloured number in the coloured dots
What is involved in the visual part of the where stream?
Location, movement, spatial, transformations, spatial relations
What is involved in the visual part of the what stream?
colour, texture, pictorial detail, shape, size
what is the visual field?
The portion of the surroundings that can be seen at one time. The total visual field is the sum of the left and right hemifields. So the left hemisphere recives infor about the right hemifields from both eyes
Visual field defects
visual field defects can occur at any part of the visual pathway. The placemetn of the lesions changes what can be seen depending on which hemifields are taken out by the lesion
Describe the four areas in the brain that the retina projects to
Lateral geniculate nucleus - in the thalamus, the major subcortical area relaying visual info to the primary visual cortex
Superior colliculus - of the midbrain which controls eye orientating movement
Suprachiasmatic nucleus - hypothalamus which regulates circadian rhythms
The pretectum - of the midbrain which controls the pupillary light reflex
How is a signal transmitted through the retina?
The electromagnetic signal is transformed into chemical and electrical signals.
A spikeless mode where membrane potential and synaptic transmission are continuous and graded (which is why vision is not all or nothing).
Under most ambient conditions most graded potential retinal neurons operate near the midpoint of their response range, so they are capable of signalling increases and decreases.
What factors effect out recognition of of an image in our visual field?
Background illumination (contrast)
Spatial frequency (how rapid the stimulus change across space)
Wavelength (detection by photoreceptors)
Dark adaptation (rods and cones recovery function)
Processing of information by the retina (pathways that deal with simple components such as shapes colours borders )
how does processing in the retina happen?
At least a dozen different representations of the visual world, each embodied at a separate sub layer of the inner plexiform layer and carried by a separate class of ganglion
what is the ratio of cones to rods
1:20 so there is a higher threshold to light
what is the sensitivity of phototopic vision to light
luminance level is about 0.03cd/m2 where the cone mechanism mediates vision