Physiology 3120 Lecture 5: Lecture 5 - Somatosensory system 2
9 Dec 2017
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Document Summary
Peripheral receptors deconstruct environmental energy on the body"s surface into aps that then can be propagated into the cns. How outside world is turned into spikes. Cns processes and reconstructs (decodes) population of aps into meaningful representations of the outside world within the brain (object in the hand or the texture on a surface). Reconstruction of environmental energy: ultimately make a judgement about the outside world, can"t do that directly on the outside world, do it on the aps themselves. Reconstruction of stimuli focus on cerebral cortex (highly- folded outside coating of the brain: reconstruction does not start at the somatosensory cortex. Other neurons along the somatosensory processing pathway synapse (e. g. exchange of information at the level of the brainstem and thalamus and spinal cord). Somatosensory cortex is a sub-compartment of the cerebral cortex. Somatosensory" cortex b/c recordings have shown strong representation of somatosensory signals in that part of the brain: somatosensory cortex is behind the central sulcus.
