The Nervous System

(Jacky sees a Rat)

Watch the animation above.
The green dot represents the message going through a single neuron.

When I see the rat, my eyes send a message through nerve cells like this.
The message starts as an electrical impulse outside the dendrites, then it converts to a chemical impulse that moves into the cell body, and down the axon. When it gets to the end of the axon, it turns back into an electrical impulse that jumps through the synapse to the dendrites on the next neuron.

The message is going through the neurons at up to the speed of light!

The message is sent to my brain by nerves passing the message at the synapse,
the space between the nerve cells.
(But the nerve cells do not actually touch.)

Then my brain sends another message to my leg muscles to jump up onto a chair.

Notes on how we did this and where the pictures came from:

The animation above started as a regular picture file from the the great "Neuroscience for kids" website
at http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/cells.html.
Mom and I opened the image in Photoshop, a picture editing software,
and saved 10 different images with the green dot moving across the neuron.
We then used a shareware program called GIF Construction Set
which automatically created the animated GIF file above.
Pretty neat huh?
(The Neuroscience for Kids site also has a page
with flash games like "Build a Brain" and "Make a Neuron.")

The background image on these pages is a modified version of a file from a
University of Pennsylvania website which has pictures of real neurons.
The address of that site is http://glinda.lrsm.upenn.edu/~weeks/neurons.html.

This was all made posible by the internet and the help of my mom, so I send my thanks to both of you!

Return to the Introduction page, Jacky Sees a Rat!

Return to the JackySuch.com home page.