What is Brain Repair?
A non-technical account of our scientific objectives
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What is Brain Damage?
Many forms of trauma and disease affect the nervous system to produce permanent neurological disability. The cells responsible for the functioning of the nervous system are neurones, and various types of glial cell.
What do neurones do?
The neurones are the cells in the nervous system that receive and transmit electical signals, or nerve impulses. They are connected together by nerve fibres, or axons, which transmit information from one neurone to another at connections, or synapses.
Thus when you contract a limb muscle and move the limb, a neurone in the motor cortex area of the brain becomes electrically active, and sends nerve impuses down its axon which runs into the spinal cord (green on the diagram), connecting to a motor neurone in the spinal cord. The motor neurone, which in turn becomes electrically active, sends nerve impulses down its axon (red in the diagram). The axon of the motor neurone connects directly to muscle cells (red) at a synapse, so when there are nerve impulses in the motor neurone nerve it leads directly to muscle contraction.
Thus when you contract a limb muscle and move the limb, a neurone in the motor cortex area of the brain becomes electrically active, and sends nerve impuses down its axon which runs into the spinal cord (green on the diagram), connecting to a motor neurone in the spinal cord. The motor neurone, which in turn becomes electrically active, sends nerve impulses down its axon (red in the diagram). The axon of the motor neurone connects directly to muscle cells (red) at a synapse, so when there are nerve impulses in the motor neurone nerve it leads directly to muscle contraction.
The whole function of the nervous system depends on similar processes, with information being transmitted as nervous impulses down axons, and passing to other neurones via synapses.