Ganglion Cells essays

Ganglion Cells essays Light is changed into sight by converting light into electrical stimuli. These electrical impulses are sent from the retina to the brain and are interpreted as images. The retina is membrane lines the inside wall of the eye which consists of 5 main cells: photoreceptors (rods The ganglion cell collects the electrical messages concerning the visual signal from the two layers of nerve cells preceding it in the retinal wiring scheme. The ganglion cell represents the ultimate signaller to the brain for retinal information. Ganglion cells transmit signals (via electrical pathways) to the brain, with a small amount of calcium flow into the cell. Ganglion cells are larger on average than most preceding retinal interneurons and have large diameter axons capable of passing the electrical signal to the retinal recipient areas of the brain many millimeters or centimeters distant from the retina. The optic nerve collects all the axons of the ganglion cells and this bundle of more than a million fibers (in humans) then passes information to the next relay station in the brain for sorting and integrating into further information processing channels. There are many different varieties of ganglion cells which can be classified based on form, number of sublayers in the stratification levels in the inner plexiform layer, cell body and dendritic tree size. For example the large ganglion cells, with open radiate branching patterns, process fast, transient impulse trains and in all vertebrate retinas are concerned with motion detection and alerting the animal to threatening, moving visual imagery. While small bushy ganglion cell types are concerned with processing small stationa ...