psychology-health

Imagine two tennis balls joined by a long piece of string. After playing with the tennis balls, your dog chews one of them off the string, leaving the end of the string frayed and covered in slobber. The tennis balls are the cell bodies, and the neuron is in the center of that cell body. The fuzz on the tennis ball is comprised of thousands of tiny hairs which are known as dendrites. The string which joined the balls together is a series of axons, and the slobber on the string is known as myelin. Myelin is also like the insulation you can put around water pipes to prevent them from freezing!The end of the string which has been chewed now has many smaller strings coming from the center of it. Each of these has a tiny knot on the end, these knots are called buttons. If you were to hold the broken end of the string close to the ball without touching them together, the small spaces between the ends of the string and the ball are called synapses. When neurons fire, messages are sent along the axons; the string and they travel very fast because of that slobber on the string (myelin). When the message gets to the end of the string, it has to jump across the gap (synapses) to the ball (neuron). These messages (neurotransmitters) bind to receptors. So, imagine a grain of sand which has gotten stuck in the slobber on the tennis ball.When multiple messages are sent at the same time, depolarization may occur. Depolarization means that electrical charge on the surface of the membrane is reduced, and this triggers the neuron (tennis ball) to start sending messages all over again.