General overview of the nervous system

15 important questions on General overview of the nervous system

What is the difference between grey matter and white matter?

Grey matter consists mostly of neuron cell bodies, which form the outer layer of the brain but the inner layer of the spinal cord. and the white matter consist mostly of bundles axons, forms the inner layer of the brain but the outer layer of the spinal cord.

What is the function of reflexes?

Reflexes protect the body by providing rapid, involuntary responses to stimuli.

Why are reflexes so fast?

The information doesn’t have to travel from the spinal cord to the brain and back because sensory information is used to activate motor neurons.
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Where does the central nervous system consists of?

The central nervous system consists of the brain and the spinal cord. These two components are responsible for processing and transmitting information through the body, controlling various functions such as movement, sensation, and cognition.

What is the difference between the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain?

The fore brain is involved in olfactory input (smells), regulation of sleep, learning an complex processing, the midbrain is involved in coordinating routing of sensory input and the hindbrain is involved in involuntary motor activities such as locomotion.

What is the correlation between the size and function of brain regions?

Brain regions that are much more used are lager in size then the regions that are not used that often. The same for neurons. Not every part of the body needs as many neurons. Fingers, mouth, or nose needs much more neurons than the low arm or the legs.

What is the function of the medulla and the pons?


  • Transfer information between parts of the brain
  • Large-scale body movements
  • Homeostatic function: hart beathing etc.

What is the difference between sensory areas, associate areas, motor areas?

  • Sensory areas receive information and process sensory information
  • Association areas integrate information
  • Motor areas transmit instructions to other parts of the body.

How did they discover that there were different functions of the brains?

They discovered this because of the Phineas Gage incident. After the incident. his personality changes because a large portion of the frontal lobe was damaged.

Which three main parts are there of the brain?

1. Reptilian brain (green)
2. Paleomammalian brian (orange)
3. Neomamalian brain (blue)

What is the function of the neomamalian brain?


Higher order thinking (cerebrum)

Why is it that the left-brain controls much of the movements of the right side of the body and vice versa?

This is because most axons that carry instruction about these movements cross from one side of the central nervous system to the other as they pass through the medulla.

Where is arousal and sleep controlled?

This is controlled in part by the reticular formation, this is a diffuse network formed primarily by neurons in the midbrain and pons.

What are the steps of the development of the nervous system?

  1. Neurons start to develop at 4 weeks, gene expression and signal transduction will determine where they will be formed
  2. There are more neurons developed then needed, so the neurons are going to compete with each other and the neurons that are not needed are eliminated.
  3. Then the neurons that survived will form too many synapses so synaptic pruning has to take place.

Which neurons will survive?

The neurons that need growth-supporting factors will stay alive, the ones that don't reach their proper location won't receive growth supporting factors and will dye.

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