Tagged: nerve
Comparing Nervous and Hormonal Coordination: Grade 9 Understanding for IGCSE Biology 2.86
This topic requires you to understand how nervous and hormonal coordination compare and to understand the differences between the two systems.
Coordination is the life process by which organisms can detect and respond to a change in the environment. These changes in the environment that can be detected are called stimuli. A stimulus can be outside the body (e.g. the air temperature dropping) or internal (e.g. an increase in the concentration of glucose in the blood after a meal).
How do organisms detect and respond to stimuli?
There are two systems that can bring about coordination:
- Nervous System
- Hormonal System (also known as the Endocrine system)
The nervous system is made up of around 100 billion specialised cells called neurones. Neurones (nerve cells) are adapted in that they can transmit an electrical event called nerve impulse (or sometimes an action potential) rapidly from one end of the cell to the other. You should understand the simplest pattern of nervous coordination which is called a reflex arc.
The hormonal system works in a completely different way. There are no electrical impulses in the hormonal system. A hormone is a chemical that is released into the blood stream and exerts an effect at a target tissue elsewhere in the body.
Have a read of my blog post on hormones to find out more…..
If you understand how these two systems are able to link one part of the body to another, then you can see how these two compare.
The first rows in the table have already been discussed.
Because the nerve impulse travels along a neurone at up to 100 m/s you can see that the nervous response will be much faster than a hormone that is secreted into the blood. It can take up to a minute or two for a hormone to travel from the secreting cell to the target cell. So nervous coordination is fast, hormonal is slow.
The response to a nervous signal often only lasts for a short time. Nervous responses tend to be muscle contractions and these are temporary of course. Hormones on the other hand often are involved in longer term processes like growth and development. As an example, think of the changes brought about at puberty by the hormones testosterone (in men) and oestrogen (in women).
Finally you can compare where the response occurs. Nerve cells can only cause a response at the exact point where they end. They release neurotransmitters into a synapse and this exerts an effect on the next neurone or muscle cell. Because hormones are released into the blood plasma, and blood is carried everywhere in the body, a single hormone can effect many targets in the body. For example, adrenalin (epinephrine for our American cousins) is a hormone released by the adrenal gland above the kidneys. But the target tissues for adrenalin are found all over the body – e.g. the heart, the skeletal muscles, the iris in the eye, the hairs in the skin, the lungs, the liver etc. Read more about adrenalin in my blog post here.
I hope this helps….. Please leave a comment in the box below to either give me some feedback, give me some suggestions for future posts or to ask a question.
Great video introduction to Nervous Systems: Grade 9 Understanding for IGCSE Biology 2.86
You all should really subscribe to the Crash Course YouTube channel. Some of their output is perhaps more suitable for A level students, but the scientific content is great. I really like the presentation too but it is quite American (I hope my readers in the US will understand….) so I am prepared for people to disagree….
Anyway here is the introduction video to Nervous Systems: great for my two Year 11 groups just now. Enjoy.
Nerve Cells and Synapses: Grade 9 Understanding for IGCSE Biology 2.88 2.89
There is very little in the iGCSE specification about nerve cells and synapses. This is a shame since neuroscience is going to be one of the massive growth areas in Biology in the 21st century. There is a syllabus point about reflex acs and I draw your attention to this blog post about that: https://pmgbiology.wordpress.com/2014/04/22/a-simple-reflex-arc/
But in this new post I am going to give you a tiny bit more detail about the types of nerve cells (neurones) that you might encounter, together with an explanation about the most important component of the nervous systems: the chemical synapse.
Neurones are the cells in the nervous system that are adapted to send nerve impulses. You won’t fully understand what the nerve impulse is until year 13 but it is correct so that it is a temporary electrical event that can be transmitted over large distances within a cell with no loss of signal strength. The upshot of this is that neurones can be very long indeed…..
There are three basic types of neurone that are grouped according to their function:
Motor neurones (efferent neurones) take nerve impulses from the CNS to skeletal muscle causing it to contract
Sensory neurones (afferent neurones) take nerve impulses from sensory receptors into the CNS
Relay (or sometimes Inter) neurones are found within the CNS and basically link sensory to motor neurones.
These three types of neurone also have different structures although many features are shared….
This is a diagram of a generalised motor neurone: I know it is a motor neurone since the cell body is at one end of the cell. The cell body contains the nucleus, most of the cytoplasm and many organelles. Structures that carry a nerve impulse towards the cell body are called dendrites (if there are lots of them) and a dendron if there is only one. The axon is the long thin projection of the cell that takes the nerve impulse away from the cell body. The axon will finish with a collection of nerve endings or synapses.
Neurones can only send nerve impulses in one direction. In the diagram above these two cells can only send impulses from left to right as shown. This is due to the nature of the junction between the cells, the synapse (see later on….)
The diagram above shows a sensory neurone. You can tell this because it has receptors at one end collecting sensory information to take to the CNS. The position of the cell body is also different in sensory neurones: in all sensory neurones the cell body is off at right angles to the axon/dendron.
You can see from the diagrams that motor and sensory neurones tend to be surrounded by a myelin sheath. Myelin is a type of lipid that acts as an insulator, speeding up the nerve impulse from around 0.5m/s in unmyelinated neurones to about 100 m/s in the fastest myelinated ones. The myelin sheath is made from a whole load of cells (glial cells) but there are gaps between glial cells called nodes of Ranvier. These will become important in Y12/13 when you study how the impulse manages to travel so fast in a myelinated neurone.
Relay neurones, also known as interneurones, have a much simpler structure. They are only found in the CNS, almost always unmyelinated and have their cell body in the centre of the cell.
The diagram above shows the three types of neurone and indeed how they are linked up in a simple reflex arc. The artist hasn’t really shown the interneurone structure very well, but it was the best I could find just now…..
Nerve cells are linked together (and indeed linked to muscle cells) by structures known as synapses. There are a lot of synapses in your nervous system. The human brain contains around 100 billion neurones and each neurone is linked by synapses to around 1000 other cells: a grand total of 100 trillion synapses. 100 000 000 000 000 is a big number.
The big idea with synapses is that the two neurones do not actually touch. There is a tiny gap called the synaptic cleft between the cells. The nerve impulse does not cross this tiny gap as an electrical event but instead there are chemicals called neurotransmitters that diffuse across the synaptic cleft.
The nerve impulse arrives at the axon terminal of the presynaptic neurone. Inside this swelling are thousands of tiny membrane packets called vesicles, each one packed with a million or so molecules of neurotransmitter. When the impulse arrives at the terminal, a few hundred of these vesicles are stimulated to move towards and then fuse with the cell membrane, releasing the neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft. The neurotransmitter will diffuse rapidly across the gap and when it reaches the post-synaptic membrane, it binds to specific receptor molecules embedded in the post-synaptic membrane. The binding of the neurotransmitter to the receptor often causes a new nerve impulse to form in the post-synaptic cell.
These chemical synapses are really beautiful things. They ensure the nerve impulse can only cross the synapse in one direction (can you see why?) and also they are infinitely flexible. They can be strengthened and weakened, their effects can be added together and when this is all put together, complex behaviour can emerge. I am going to exhibit some complex behaviour now by choosing to take my dogs for a walk… And it all happened due to synapses in my brain!
A Simple Reflex Arc: Grade 9 Understanding for IGCSE Biology 2.90
GCSE Biology students often find the reflex arc a difficult topic in the section on human coordination and response. This is because it is the only type of response they learn about and doesn’t really fit into a sensible flow of ideas on the various types of behaviours organisms can show. But it is not too complicated, at least if you restrict yourself to ideas that might be tested in the iGCSE exam.
Prior Knowledge (you need to understand these things before you can appreciate a reflex arc)
- basic structure of a neurone/nerve cell
- three different kinds of neurones – sensory, motor and relay – and where they are found in the body
- nerve impulses are electrical events that travel at up to 100ms-1 along nerve cells but cross synapses much more slowly by diffusion of a chemical called a neurotransmitter
Reflex responses
Most human behaviours are complex and involve millions of neurones interacting in the brain. Our ability to link stimuli (changes in the environment) with an appropriate response can develop over time, can be modified by past experience and can produce different outcomes depending on the circumstances. For example if you see a fast moving spherical object moving towards your head, you might head it (football), catch it (cricket), hit it (cricket again), duck out of the way (cricket again) or eat it (flying Malteser)
A simple reflex response is much more straightforward: the same stimulus always produces the same response. It does not need to be learned but is innate (you are born with it) and in humans, reflex responses tend to be involved in protecting the body from harm or maintaining posture. The example we look at is called a withdrawal reflex to a painful stimulus e.g. touching a hot plate on a cooker.
The response to this is that you contract muscles in your arm to move your hand away from the hot plate. The key idea is that you will do this before you feel the heat or burn the skin. The sequence of events is
- touch the hot plate (pain receptors stimulated in the skin)
- move your arm away (reflex arc)
- feel the pain (brain receives the nerve impulses and a conscious sensation of pain is felt
The reason that you move your arm away before you feel anything is that your brain is not involved in this response. This produces a rapid, involuntary reaction called a reflex response. The reason the response is so rapid is that at most three neurones are involved in linking the painful stimulus to the response. The arrangement of these three neurones is called a reflex arc.
The cell that detects the stimulus is called a sensory neurone. One end of this cell is a pain receptor in the skin and the other end of this individual cell is found in the spinal cord (see diagram above) Neurones can be very long cells! The sensory neurone forms a synapse (junction) with a relay neurone found entirely in the grey matter in the centre of the spinal cord and this in turn synapses with a motor neurone. The cell body of the motor neurone is on the spinal cord and the other end of this individual cell is a synapse with a skeletal muscle in the arm.
Synapses are the things that slow nerve impulses down and as this whole pathway only includes two synapses (sensory-relay and relay-motor) the response will be as fast as possible. The response is involuntary as the brain is not involved.
In humans, we can modify most reflex responses using the conscious parts of our brain. As the sensory neurone synapses with the relay neurone in the diagram, it will also synapse with other neurones carrying nerve impulses up to the brain. This is why touching a hot plate will hurt (the feeling of pain is in the brain). There will also be neurones from the brain that can modify the synapse between the relay and motor neurone. If I told you that I would pay anyone who can touch a hot plate for 2 seconds $10,000 (although of course I don’t have $10,000) many of you would be able to force yourself not to pull your arm away from the hotplate when you touch it. You could overcome the reflex response with signals from your brain which would know how much fun you could have with $10,000.
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