We’ve all heard that neurons communicate with each other through electrical impulses. While some of the synapses are purely electrical, most of these connections are mediated by chemical elements. These chemicals are what we call “neurotransmitters. ” Thanks to them, do neurons have the ability to participate in different cognitive functions such as learning, memory, perception?
We currently know more than a dozen neurotransmitters involved in neural synapses. His study allowed us to learn a lot about how neurotransmission works, which has led to improvements in drug development and understanding of the effects of psychotropic drugs. The most well-known neurotransmitters are: Serotonin, Dopamine, Norepinephrine, Acetylcholine, Glutamate and GABA.
- In this article.
- To better understand the principles of neurotransmission we will explore two very important aspects.
- The first is to know the different ways in which neurotransmitters influence synapses and the second aspect that we are going to talk about is the signal transduction cascade: the most common mode of operation of neurotransmitters.
The main function of neurotransmitters is to model the synapse between neurons, in this way it is possible to make the electrical connections between them more complex and give way to many other possibilities, if the neurotransmitters did not exist and neurons acted as mere threads, many functions of the nervous system would not be possible.
Well, the way neurotransmitters influence neurons is not always the same, we can find two different ways in which synapses is altered by chemical effects, below we will expose the two types of effects:
The cascade of signal transduction is the process by which the neurotransmitter modulates the functioning of a neuron, in this section we will focus on how neurotransmitters do it through metabotropic receptors, since this is the most common mode of operation.
The process consists of four different phases
Neurotransmitters are very important chemicals in our nervous system, they are responsible for modulating and transmitting information between different brain nuclei, in addition, their effects on neurons can last from a few seconds to months or even years, through your study we can understand the correlation between many superior cognitive processes, such as learning, memory and attention, etc.