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In certain sensory neurons (pseudounipolar neurons), such as those for touch and warmth, the axons are called afferent nerve fibers and the electrical impulse travels along these from the periphery to the cell body and from the cell body to the spinal cord along another branch of the same axon.
Four types of sensory neuron. Sensory neurons, also known as afferent neurons, are neurons in the nervous system, that convert a specific type of stimulus, via their receptors, into action potentials or graded receptor potentials. [1] This process is called sensory transduction.
The sensory nervous system is a part of the nervous system responsible for processing sensory information. A sensory system consists of sensory neurons (including the sensory receptor cells), neural pathways , and parts of the brain involved in sensory perception and interoception .
Afferent neurons are pseudounipolar neurons that have a single process leaving the cell body dividing into two branches: the long one towards the sensory organ, and the short one toward the central nervous system (e.g. spinal cord). These cells do have sensory afferent dendrites, similar to those typically inherent in neurons. [1]
In vertebrates, the majority of neurons belong to the central nervous system, but some reside in peripheral ganglia, and many sensory neurons are situated in sensory organs such as the retina and cochlea. Axons may bundle into nerve fascicles that make up the nerves in the peripheral nervous system (like strands of wire that make up a cable).
The cell bodies of sensory neurons known as first-order neurons are located in the dorsal root ganglia. [2] The axons of dorsal root ganglion neurons are known as afferents. In the peripheral nervous system, afferents refer to the axons that relay sensory information into the central nervous system (i.e. the brain and the spinal cord).
These include sensory neurons that transmute physical stimuli such as light and sound into neural signals, and motor neurons that transmute neural signals into activation of muscles or glands; however in many species the great majority of neurons participate in the formation of centralized structures (the brain and ganglia) and they receive all ...
In sensory neurons, action potentials result from an external stimulus. However, some excitable cells require no such stimulus to fire: They spontaneously depolarize their axon hillock and fire action potentials at a regular rate, like an internal clock. [32] The voltage traces of such cells are known as pacemaker potentials. [33]