Larry M

Mechanics of Movement

NOTE: PhysioEx needs password, but textbooks have similar simulator in package

(MDC e-mail, #exito)

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DO YOU LIKE TO THINK IN SEQUENCES? DID YOU LEARN THE ALPHABET ALL IN A ROW...OR DO YOU LIKE SEPARATING THE VOWELS AND CONSONANTS?

I can imagine a compendium notebook construction for what we've done on the nervous system that just takes our basic reflex example--the finger on the hot stove and arm pulling back--and maps it out from start to finish. Maybe it would be on a big piece of butcher-block paper, or the backside of an ancient scroll (this does, after all, embody everything we can do as humans) or a bunch of sheets taped together: First the sensory neuron interacting with the Merkel cells on the skin, details of how the action potential is triggered to send a message down the sensory neuron, a sense of the scale of the axon, its excitable cell membrane, the surrounding Schwann cells with their myelin forming the myelination or myelin sheath....onto the cell body of the sensory neuron, its location in the dorsal root ganglion, maybe some details of that ganglion, its relation to the spinal cord, on up through the dorsal root into the spinal cord, a cross section of the cord, its gray and white matter, its relation to the vertebral column....then something about "command central," the black box of how the message is processed, at the spinal cord level, maybe back up to the brain (details on that later), then the response...a motor neuron triggered at its cell body, the location of that cell body (back to the spinal cord), the way the action potential (repeat) travels down the motor neuron axon,, the makeup of the spinal nerve where that axon is located, the different types of neurons that would/could/should be in the spinal nerve (maybe an aside on visceral/autonomic motor neurons--sympathetics and parasympathetics--where they're located) and then the motor message arrives at the muscle, the terminal of the axon and its synapse (neuro-muscular junction) with the muscle cells that it triggers to contract--taking us right into the next topic for this part of the semester...how muscle cells work.