Sensation and Touching, continued 10/26/2015

There are fixed, predetermined pathways for sensory information processing by the brain thinking about circuits rather than individual neurons - understanding their journey
Somatosensory pathways
The Law of Specific nerve energies and labeled lines
Neurons have been deployed via development to specific signals
Your brain is designed to interpret the specific stimulated neurons in a particular way
i.e. extreme cold sometimes activates heat senses
the brain operates by design - strict structural concepts
Different types of sensory axons
Key differences are how fat the axons are an how much myelin incases them
The more myelination, the faster the action potential
Muscle spindle - deals with the sense of your body, the fastest, most myelinated axon
Corpucles - deals with touch - slower than spindles but still myelinated
Free nerve endings
Pain and temperature - almost no myelination, relatively slow
Temperature, pain, and itch - no myelination, very slow
The reflex - a simple neuronal circuit
Sensory neuron perspective
1. Muscle stretches in reaction to stimulus (the muscle spindle has stretch receptors)
2. Graded receptor potential (receptor potential/generator potential, sufficient enough to
induce an action potential)
3. Action potentials are deployed and receptor potential disappears - it passively decays
4. Enters dorsal horn of spinal cord and makes synapses
5. One muscle contracts, another relaxes
This circuit has logic - intraneuron reverses so that one muscle contracts and another
relaxes - the relaxation occurs via an inhibitory neuron that has fewer action potentials
Sensory processing
Hierarchal framework - all sensations operate in this framework
1. Some kind of receptor - mechanical for touch
2. Neurons with specialized endings to detect energies
3. Enters the spinal cord via dorsal horn
4. Travel up to the brain stem (madulla)
5. Cell bodies receive inputs via synapses
6. Project to the thalamus aka the relay hub for everything
7. Sends signals to the particular parts of the sensory cortical areas specialized to recevie
those signals specifically
8. Also some secondary areas receive these signals
Basic design of your brain is to process any kind of external information
Somatosensory pathways
Sensory and motor are typically crossed pathways
Sensations on one side of the body are processed on the opposite side of the brain
Dorsal column system - delivers touch sensations to the brain
Dermatomes - different parts of your body are mapped to different parts of your dorsal
column - where those sensations enter on the spinal cord depending where a stimulus is
felt
Brain regions reflect the density of the receptors aka the innervation

 Experience alters receptive fields - if the nerve to the body region is severed, the cortical
areas will shrink
Use informs development
Neurons that used to process one sensation are reallocated to receive and process
different sensations
Hot
and cold receptors

Free nerve endings close to the skin

Hot and cold are in different parts of the skin with different intensities
Unmyelinated and thin
Respon to small changes - not necessarily absolute temperature
Cold responds quicker than hot (the cold are made of delta fibers and the hot are
completely unmyelinated)
Pain receptors
Ascending or descending information
Ascending means it travels to the brain
Descending is modulatory - mind over matter, in a sense - thinking you dont want to feel it
and thus you do not (think David Blane staying in a tub of ice water for super long)
Anesthetics and pressures block pain - restricts neural opiates and blood flow, thus action
potential generation
Weaker, skinnier, and unmyelinated fibers
Nociceptors - peripheral receptors that respond to painful stimuli
Pain
1. Cells are damage
2. Cells release stuff like anti-inflamatories, generating an action potential
3. Information enters dorsal horn
4. Brain interprets the release of stuff as pain in the anterior cingulate (pain is completely
perceptual)