Neuropsychology: The Central Nervous System

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Neuropsychology combines neurology and psychology.

The nervous system consists of the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system.

The CNS consists of the spinal cord and brain. The spinal cord communicates with all muscles and sense organs of the body below the head. Spinal nerves attached to the spinal cord pass signals from the environment to the spinal cord which sends a reply from the spinal cord to the body.

The brain is divided into hindbrain, midbrain and forebrain. The hindbrain consists of the medulla oblongata - responsible for involuntary behaviours, the pons - responsible for sending signals from the spine to the brain and back again to the spine and the cerebellum - responsible for coordinated movement, balance …show more content…
The somatic nervous system controls voluntary movement and the autonomic nervous system controls involuntary movement, broken down into two more systems. The sympathetic system gets the body ready for action. Parasympathetic action helps the body relax once the stress has past.

Neurons consist of three parts; soma, dendrites and axon. The electric pulse (message) travels from one neuron to the next. Dendrites have many branches which receive messages from many adjacent neurons. This message travels through the soma to the neuron where the messages from dendrites are processed. The message travels down the axon of the neuron and transmits the message to other neurons. The message arrives at the axon terminals at the end of the neurons where the message is passed to other neurons.

When the electrical impulse gets to the end of a neuron it needs to pass to the next neuron. The difficulty is that the terminal button from the first neuron and dendrite of the second neuron are not connected. The space between the two neurons is the synaptic gap. The electrical pulse has to pass over this gap to get the message over to the next neuron. Synaptic transmission is a chemical
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