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Saturday, October 24, 2009

Why is the spinal cord an essential part of the nervous system?

anyone out there with any help? Psych or Med students?
Answer:
How do you travel from home to work? You take a road or a highway. If there were no path or road you wouldn't go anywhere. Same thing with the spinal cord. It is the highway from the brain to the rest of the body. Without it there would be no way for brain impulses to travel to organs, muscles, etc and you would die.
The medulla spinalis or spinal cord forms the elongated, nearly cylindrical, part of the central nervous system which occupies the upper two-thirds of the vertebral canal. Its average length in the male is about 45 cm., in the female from 42 to 43 cm., while its weight amounts to about 30 gms. It extends from the level of the upper border of the atlas to that of the lower border of the first, or upper border of the second, lumbar vertebra. Above, it is continuous with the brain; below, it ends in a conical extremity, the conus medullaris, from the apex of which a delicate filament, the filum terminale, descends as far as the first segment of the coccyx.
You can have more information with beautiful explaination and picturesin the below given website, Good Luck.
It links all the nerves in the body to the brain.
Im no Med student. But, If you were to analyse the skeletons of animals ranging from fish,snakes,cows to humans. You would notice the simmilar structure. This would be a clue to a common origin and linked ancestry among the various skeletal structures and therefore organisms.
A spinal cord is like a main power line that other lines diverge from. All of the electrical activity happens in the nervous system which extends to all of the muscle systems and the brain. The spinal cord is a design feature in more complex animals from fish to humans. It is not essential to a nervous system. Since, jelly fish,sea slugs and Im not sure if some insects also have nervous systems.
Spinal cord like brain and all nerves is developed from neurectoderm of embryo.
spinal cord relays the stimulus from the affected organ to the brain...
Because without it you just have a big bowl of grey jelly sitting on top of an old table with four legs that don't fold up.
Think of the cranial nerves as county roads and the spinal cord as a superhighway. Not much traffic between the brain and the body without it. Not to mention it's nice to have some lower motor neuron function.

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