This builtin is not currently supported: Animation
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
- Article Categories
- Book Categories
- Collections
- Custom Solutions
- Log In
- Main Menu
Article Categories
- Main Menu
Book Categories
Frank Amthor
Frank Amthor, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama and holds a secondary appointment in the UAB Medical School Department of Neurobiology. He has been an NIH-supported researcher for over 20 years and has published over 100 journal articles and conference abstracts.
Articles & Books From Frank Amthor
Article / Updated 06-06-2023
Although not located in the skin, receptors mediating proprioception (position sense) and kinesthesis (movement sense), are either free nerve endings or structures similar to mechanoreceptors like Ruffini corpuscles (refer to the first figure below) and have similar layouts as the cell bodies in the dorsal root ganglia (refer to the second figure).
Article / Updated 09-11-2016
The sense of pain can be reduced in several ways, including the body's own production of endorphins. Feeling pain is, well, painful. Wouldn't you be better off if you could just eliminate pain? The answer to the question of whether you would be better off without a sense of pain is a resounding no.This situation actually occurs in some people.
Article / Updated 04-18-2023
Although pain is a necessary function for preventing damage to the body, in some cases, pain itself becomes disabling. Chronic pain can occur in disease conditions such as cancer, in which case the normal function of pain that forces you to rest, protect, or not use some injured part of the body until it heals is simply inappropriate in a disease state in which destruction is occurring from the cancer all over the body that cannot be healed from rest.
Article / Updated 09-11-2016
Most psychoactive drugs mimic the action of known neurotransmitters, but until a few decades ago, there was no known neurotransmitter that mediated the general effects of pain. Here's a mystery that puzzled researchers for a long time: Why does a substance produced by a poppy plant (morphine) relieve pain?This all changed with the discovery of endogenous opioids (that is, opioids that are developed naturally within the body).
Article / Updated 09-11-2016
Skin receptors allow you to respond to things that contact your skin and to be aware of what those things are. The output of most somatosensory receptors participates in at least three different kinds of neural circuits:
Local reflexes are those that primarily involve contraction of a single muscle, such as a flexor like the biceps that contracts when, for example, you touch something hot.
Article / Updated 09-11-2016
You can detect more than just various kinds of pressure on your skin. Two other skin senses are temperature and pain. These receptors have similar structures, or, really, lack of structure. All the mechanoreceptors consist of an axon terminal with ion channel receptors embedded in some sort of structure, such as a corpuscle, disk, or myelin wrapping, that gives the receptor its particular responsiveness to different mechanical stimulation frequencies.
Article / Updated 09-11-2016
Somatosensory neurons, the tips of which form the mechanoreceptors, have an unusual morphology, or structure. This morphology is crucial to their function. Their morphological classification is called pseudounipolar. Although this rather unwieldy name isn't particularly illuminating about their function, understanding their structure explains some aspects about how these receptors work.
Article / Updated 09-11-2016
Inside the skin's dermis are four distinctive types of touch receptors, termed mechanoreceptors. The following figure shows the layers of the skin and some of its receptors. The layers of the skin and some of its receptors.
Merkel disks
Merkel disk receptors, as their name implies, are disk-shaped receptors located close to the border between the dermis and epidermis; sometimes they extend into the epidermis.
Article / Updated 09-11-2016
The skin is an organ, one of the largest organs in the body in terms of area, and it has a number of important functions. To perform all these functions, the skin has several layers with different properties.
The dermis and epidermis
The outermost layer of the skin is called the epidermis (epi means "on" or "above," and dermis means "skin").
Article / Updated 09-11-2016
The earliest brain recordings — electroencephalograms, or EEGs — used surface electrodes on the scalp to record ongoing brain potentials from large areas of the brain. Most of what researchers know about individual neuronal function (neurophysiology) began in about the middle of the 20th century with the invention and use of microelectrodes, which could sample the activity of single neurons, and oscilloscopes, which could display events lasting milliseconds or less.