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Not all animals have neurons; Trichoplax and sponges lack nerve cells altogether. Neurons may be packed to form structures such as the brain of vertebrates or the neural ganglions of insects. The number of neurons and their relative abundance in different parts of the brain is a determinant of neural function and, consequently, of behavior.
In the nervous system, a synapse [1] is a structure that allows a neuron (or nerve cell) to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another neuron or a target effector cell. Synapses can be classified as either chemical or electrical, depending on the mechanism of signal transmission between neurons.
Where Hebbian plasticity mechanisms modify neural synaptic connections selectively, synaptic scaling normalizes all neural synaptic connections [2] by decreasing the strength of each synapse by the same factor (multiplicative change), so that the relative synaptic weighting of each synapse is preserved. [1]
The number of synapses in the human cerebral cortex has separately been estimated at 0.15 quadrillion (150 trillion) [3] The word "synapse" was introduced by Sir Charles Scott Sherrington in 1897. [4] Chemical synapses are not the only type of biological synapse: electrical and immunological synapses also exist. Without a qualifier, however ...
According to a rule called Dale's principle, which has only a few known exceptions, a neuron releases the same neurotransmitters at all of its synapses. [45] This does not mean, though, that a neuron exerts the same effect on all of its targets, because the effect of a synapse depends not on the neurotransmitter, but on the receptors that it ...
An autapse is a synapse in which a neuron's axon connects to its dendrites. The human brain has some 8.6 x 10 10 (eighty six billion) neurons. [31] [32] Each neuron has on average 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. It has been estimated that the brain of a three-year-old child has about 10 15 synapses (1 quadrillion).
Synaptogenesis is the formation of synapses between neurons in the nervous system.Although it occurs throughout a healthy person's lifespan, an explosion of synapse formation occurs during early brain development, known as exuberant synaptogenesis. [1]
A diagram of the proteins found in the active zone. The active zone is present in all chemical synapses examined so far and is present in all animal species. The active zones examined so far have at least two features in common, they all have protein dense material that project from the membrane and tethers synaptic vesicles close to the membrane and they have long filamentous projections ...