Nervous System Flashcards
Dendrite
Fibers that retrieve neurotransmitter chemicals from other neurons.
Soma
Large bundle of fibers making up the main body of the neuron.
Schwann Cells
What wraps around the axon to form the Myelin Sheath.
Node of Ranvier
Tiny spaces between the Myelin Sheath making an increase in electrical charge in your cells possible.
Myelin Sheath
Used to protect the Axon and to speed up impulses, in turn increasing the action potential of the cell.
Axon
Long fiber that channels the electrical signal in the cell.
Axon Terminal
End of the neuron, contains terminal buttons which release neurotransmitter such as Dopamine, Epinephrine (Adrenaline), Serotonin, etc once it has received the signal.
CSF
(Cerebrospinal Fluid)
Protects the brain by preventing the brain from contacting the skull.
Cerebrum
Largest part of the brain, containing the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Controls conscious activities.
Frontal lobe
Located in the front of the cerebrum, it controls all analytical thinking and planning.
Contains one half of the motor cortex that involves voluntary movements.
Contains the prefrontal lobe, dealing with advanced problem solving with high amounts data, calculating information, and planning ahead.
Contains Broca’s area, which is usually located in the left hemisphere of the frontal lobe, is what makes visual information meaningful. Allowing you to interrupt changes in value, hue, color, shape, is meaningful and worth taking note of. It allows you to learn and associate objects and colors with texture and function, attaches emotion to said object. While a table isn’t really anything special, our brain still thinks it is ESSENTIAL to know that it is a table, and that it was designed to have a specific function.
This lobe takes information from organizing lobes from the thalamus and makes sense of the information and its importance, if it is valuable, if it is dangerous, if it is smelly. Most of your conscious decision making comes from here, but you need these other large sections of your brain JUST to organize and make sense of all these crazy external forces and to prioritize them in a matter of seconds, possibly even milliseconds.
Parietal lobe
Known as the sensory lobe, located in the upper back area of the brain, it deals with spatial reasoning. This includes all sorts of senses and sensations received from the rest of the nervous system, the PNS and CNS.
Deals with organizing sensory information it receives from the hypothalamus. This includes things received mainly from various receptor nerves and neurons, as well as your limbs location and status. This lobe will proceed to send the organized information to the appropriate lobe using the thalamus as the crossroads.
Temporal lobe
The primarily the auditory section of the brain, is what deals with your hearing and with sense of smell.
Contains Wernicke’s area, is what makes any speech, sound, or other noises, meaningful. For example, if I were to say something to you, you would be able to think, that sound means SOMETHING or if I dropped a pen, you’d notice that the hollow yet metallic sound of it hitting the tiles means something small and hard hit YOUR classroom floor, with the possibility of it being the table or a chair, or even a chair leg, being struck. Sending signals to different lobes to even quickly prioritize and calculate different meaning, gather evidence, etc.
Acts as a information gatherer and communicates incomplete auditorial and aromatic information to the thalamus, which then sends the information to other lobes, primarily the frontal lobe to make sense and analyze external vibrations and chemicals.
Worth noting that smell is NOT processed through the thalamus.
Occipital lobe
The optical portion of the brain, dealing with visual processing, vision and memory of objects.
Acts as a information gatherer, communicating incomplete external sources of light and its positioning through various different receptors in the eyes, such as rods, cones, etc to the thalamus, which then decides which lobe to send the information to the appropriate lobe.
Thalamus
Located in the brainstem, is what sends information between different locations of the brain through the corpus callosum.
Hypothalamus
Located just below the thalamus in the brainstem, controls and regulates the proper signals sent and received from the CNS, which receives electrical impulses from your interneurons, which were fired by efferent neurons, which were fired from your PNS. It also sends signals to the CNS which fires your interneurons which then in turn fires your afferent neurons in your PNS.
