Nervous system
Parts of the nervous system:
- Central nervous system - a bilateral, essentially symmetrical structure with distinct parts. Receives sensory information from the skin through bundles of long nerve fibers, called axons, and transforms it into coordinated motor commands that are relayed to the muscles for action through other bundles of nerves
- Spinal cord - contains the machinery needed for simple reflex behaviors.
- Brain stem - conveys sensory information to higher regions of the brain and motor commands from those regions downward to the spinal cord. Also regulates attention.
- Brain:
- Hypothalamus
- Thalamus
- Cerebellum
- Cerebral Hemispheres/ Cerebral Cortex - concerned with higher mental functions: perception, action, language, and planning. Contains about 100 billion neurons, each with about a thousand synapses, making a total of about 100 trillion synaptic connections
- frontal lobe - part of the neural circuit governing social judgements, planning and organization of activities, aspects of language, control of movement, and a form of short-term memory called working memory
- parietal lobe - receives sensory information about touch, pressure, and space around the body and helps integrate that information into coherent perceptions
- somatosensory cortex - a strip in the parietal lobe contains Wilder Penfield's sensory homunculus.
- occipital lobe in involved in vision
- temporal lobe is involved with auditory processing and aspects of language and memory.
- Basal ganglia - help regulate motor performance
- Hippocampus - involved with aspects of memory storage
- Amygdala - coordinates autonomic and endocrine responses in the context of emotional states