Name: Anatomy of a Neuron
Uploaded: 2014-11-20T07:27:00.000Z
Duration: 6 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We could have a debate about what the most interesting cell

in the human body is, but I think easily the neuron would

make the top five, and it's not just because the cell

The fact that it essentially makes up our brain and our

nervous system and is responsible for the thoughts

and our feelings and maybe for all of our sentience, I think,

would easily make it the top one or two cells.

So what I want to do is first to show you what a neuron

And, of course, this is kind of the perfect example.

And then we're going to talk a little bit about how it

performs its function, which is essentially communication,

essentially transmitting signals across its length,

So in the middle you have your soma and then from the soma--

This is a nucleus, just like any cell's nucleus.

And then the soma's considered the body of the neuron and

then the neuron has these little things sticking out

I don't want to spend too much time just drawing the neuron,

but you've probably seen drawings like this before.

And these branches off of the soma of the neuron, off of its

I want to do a fairly reasonable drawing so I'll

So these right here, these are dendrites.

Sometimes different parts of different cells perform other

functions, but these tend to be where the neuron receives

And we'll talk more about what it means to receive and

And then we have kind of a-- you can almost view it as a

A neuron can be a reasonably normal sized cell, although

there is a huge range, but the axons can be quite long.

Sometimes in the brain you might have very small axons,

but you might have axons that go down the spinal column or

that go along one of your limbs-- or if you're talking

So the axon can actually stretch several feet.

And this is really where a lot of the distance of the signal

So the axon will look something like this.

And at the end, it ends at the axon terminal where it can

connect to other dendrites or maybe to other types of tissue

or muscle if the point of this neuron is to tell a muscle to

So at the end of the axon, you have the axon

And you'll sometimes hear the word-- the point at which the

soma or the body of the neuron connects to the axon is as

often referred to as the axon hillock-- maybe you can kind

And then we're going to talk about how the impulses travel.

And a huge part in what allows them to travel efficiently are

We're going to talk about this in detail and how they

actually work, but it's good just to have the anatomical

structure first. So these are called Schwann cells and

they're covering-- they make up the myelin sheath.

So this covering, this insulation, at different

So Schwann cells make up the myelin sheath.

And then these little spaces between the myelin sheath--

just so we have all of the terminology from-- so we know

the entire anatomy of the neuron-- these are called the

Maybe he was the guy who looked and saw they had these

little slots here where you don't have myelin sheath.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Anatomy of a Neuron

brain

essentially

trigger

tend