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Neurons are the cells that make up our nervous system, and they’re made up of three main parts.
The dendrites, which are little branches off of the neuron that receive signals from other neurons, the soma, or cell body, which has all of the neuron’s main organelles like the nucleus, and the axon which is intermittently wrapped in fatty myelin.
Those dendrites receive signals from other neurons via neurotransmitters, which when they bind to receptors on the dendrite act as a chemical signal.
That binding opens ion channels that allow charged ions to flow in and out of the cell, converting the chemical signal into an electrical signal.
Since a single neuron can have a ton of dendrites receiving input, if the combined effect of multiple dendrites changes the overall charge of the cell enough, then it triggers an action potential, which is an electrical signal that races down the axon up to 100 meters per second, triggering the release of neurotransmitter on the other end and further relaying the signal.
So neurons use neurotransmitters as a signal to communicate with each other, but they use the action potential to propagate that signal within the cell.
Some of these neurons can be very long, especially ones that go from the spinal cord to the toes, so the movement of this electrical signal within the cell is super important!
But why does the cell have an electric charge in the first place? Well, it’s based on the different concentrations of ions on the inside versus the outside of the cell.
Generally speaking, there are more Na+ or sodium ions, Cl- or chloride ions, and Ca2+ or calcium ions on the outside, and more K+ or potassium ion and A- which we just use for negatively charged anions, on the inside of the cell.
Overall, the distribution of these ions gives the cell a net negative charge of close to -65 millivolts relative to the outside environment, and this is called the neuron’s resting membrane potential.
When a neurotransmitter binds to a receptor on the dendrite, a ligand-gated ion channel opens up to allow certain ions to flow in, depending on the channel.
An action potential is defined as a brief change in the electrical potential across the membrane of a neuron that occurs in response to a stimulus. An action potential occurs when neuronal dendrites receive enough excitatory postsynaptic potential (EPSPs) to open voltage-gated sodium channels, resulting in rapid depolarization of the neuronal membrane and propagation of an electrical charge down the length of the axon.
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