KNES 371 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Neural Adaptation, Limbic System, Thalamus
Document Summary
The process by which environmental energy (information outside of the body) is transformed into electrical impulses that the brain can process. General properties of sensory receptors and afferent pathways. Adequate stimulation: property that lets you know something changed around you. Intensity coding: how we know how intense something is: central mechanisms that occur at the receptor level. Sensory adaptation: blocking out some information that is received already or not important anymore. Inform the cns that a particular event has occurred in the environment. Threshold: if the stimuli does not change at a large enough volume, receptors will not activate. Identification of intensity of a sensory event. Two mechanisms: spatial summation: increased stimulus, increased number of different sensory receptors fire. Number of receptors sending information to brain; more receptors means greater stimulus: temporal summation: firing rate/frequency of individual receptors. Some are fast receptors; some are slow (it takes awhile to get used to the stimuli: nociceptors are slow.
