What is "neurotransmitters"

Usage examples of "neurotransmitters".

But because the brain is such a finely equilibrated and dynamic system, with great capacities for self-adjustment and control, the effect of disrupting its biochemistry by flooding it, via a pill, with some drug which affects protein synthesis, or particular neurotransmitters or neuromodulators, is more likely to be the equivalent of trying to retune a radio or reprogram a computer by jamming a screwdriver into its circuit boards.

Freudians, learning theorists, sociobiologists, drug-oriented psychiatrists, physiologists with interests in hormones, genes and neurotransmitters, and many others may not agree with this highly conscious, cognitive explanation of emotions.

Kandel argues that the interactions and responses of these neurons to artificially administered neurotransmitters represent, in ultimately reduced form, the memory for the reflex itself.

At the very least, in different brain regions and cell ensembles different neurotransmitters will be involved, and there are likely to be other variations in important detail in the biochemical and cellular learning strategies adopted by different species.

One of the most intriguing of evolutionary clues is the close chemical similarity between many hormones and the substances that function within the nervous system as neurotransmitters, suggesting that perhaps the second group, the neurotransmitters, may have developed evolutionarily from the first.

The graph shows the brief pulse of the action potential, which travels down the axon like a wave, normally commencing at the site where the axon leaves the nerve cell body and terminating at the synapse, where it triggers the release of neurotransmitters which diffuse across to the postsynaptic cell, carrying the depolarizing signal to it.

The action potential serves as a signal in its turn for the synapse to release neurotransmitters which trigger the response in adjacent neurons.

Several amino acids, as well as being necessary building blocks for the synthesis of proteins, are also powerful neurotransmitters, and their presence in excess can result in disruption of the electrical activity of the nerve cells.

At the same time it was necessary to speculate as to how transient changes in neurotransmitters such as serotonin, or the flow of calcium ions across the synaptic membrane, might in turn trigger the specific synthesis of the new proteins that long-term memory demanded.

It was soon apparent that the vital molecule was the transmitter amino acid, glutamate, well known as one of the commonest of the excitatory neurotransmitters of the brain and present in high concentration within neurons.

All branches of the US military, and the British Ministry of Defence chemical weapons establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, are interested in neural mechanisms and the action of neurotransmitters for what they can reveal about actual and potential chemical weapons -and they are not small spenders.

Here, too, there is no consciousness: only the computational mind, or mindless neurotransmitters, or fireworks at the synapses.