Neurotransmitters: Fire Away Fire Away

       While I was doing this week's readings, I realized/ remembered how much I hate reading textbooks.  It's not that they're not interesting, it's just that most of the time my attention-span can be very short.  In module 3.1, our textbook talks about synapses and basically what they are and their properties.  Chemical synapses or neurotransmitters, are the communicators of the brain. My quest was to learn about neurotransmitters the way that made the most sense to me.  I found this website below that links to their synapses overview.  I personally liked the picture because it's really colorful and helped my remember it better/easier.  Also, I browsed through their website and found other cool things such as, their synapses journal club, other articles focusing on different parts of the brain and dendrites, astrocytes, etc.  I went back and looked at the astrocytes on because we had gone over them last week and learned that they have relationships with the synapses in the hippocampus.  I thought that was cool and also as I continued looking through the website, I found a reconstruct software that is free and is supposed to let you examine the brain.  (http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/tools/reconstruct/reconstruct.stm)

next to this picture on the website, it takes you to a microscopic view of the different components that make the neurotransmitters.  I found this useful because drawings are nice, but seeing the real thing makes it amazing to know that those are what the ones in me look like.  It is absolutely fascinating that we start with about 10 ,000 trillion synapses and as we age we end up with roughly 1,000 to 5,000 trillion synapses.  This is a lot less than what we start off with, but the number is still in the trillions.



http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/anatomy/chemical/synapse.stm