Introduction to Sensory Receptors - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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concept
Sensory Receptors
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Hey, everyone. So this video is going to be just a brief introduction to sensory receptors. Now, sensory receptors detect stimuli or changes in our environment and they basically provide a link between our nervous system and our internal and external environments. So they allow us to know what is happening around us and what's happening inside of us. Now, an important word or key term that you may need to know is sensory transduction and this is just the process of converting a stimulus to an electrical signal, which of course is crucial for our neurons to be able to actually communicate that signal, right? And then like like we've been talking about that signal is then going to be transmitted to our central nervous system via the nerves of our peripheral nervous system or PNS. Now, sensory receptors can be classified in three different ways. So scientists kind of went crazy with this one. All right. So we are gonna have separate videos for each of these categorization methods. So right now, don't worry too much about understanding the detail, just kind of get the idea that there are three different methods of categorizing. All right. So the first method is by stimulus type. So what we're basically asking here is what type of stimulus does this receptor respond to? So, is it responding to chemicals, is it responding to something like light which would give us vision? Right? Or perhaps something like sound waves? Those are just examples. So what type of stimulus does that receptor respond to next? We have stimulus location and this one confuses some people. So just to clarify, when we say location, we mean the location of the stimulus, not the location of the receptor, often they will go hand in hand, but that's not necessarily true. So we're gonna focus on the location of the stimulus. So for example, is it an external stimulus coming from the external world like a sound wave or is it an internal stimulus? For example, the sensation of fullness in your stomach after you have a very large meal? Ok. So that is stimulus location. And then finally, we have receptor structure and this is focused more on the actual different types of sensory receptors. And you can see just some examples here. Again, don't worry about actually knowing what these are. But some examples we have here for you are hair follicle receptors and tactile core puzzles. OK. So again, we're gonna have videos on each of those coming up for you. This but this was just kind of a general introduction to sense receptors. All right. See you guys later.
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example
Introduction to Sensory Receptors Example 1
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OK. So for this example, we are gonna be figuring out what is the correct sequence of events that happens when we detect a stimulus. And looking here, I can see that all of these start with a sensory receptor. So that's good. They're all still in the running. And then I see we have two options with sensory transduction as step number two. And then we have afferent nerve and efferent nerve. Now it's important to think about this in the sense that you know, these are neurons and they can only communicate in the language of neurons, which is of course electricity. So we have to have that step of sensory transduction to actually convert this stimuli into an electrical signal. So we have eliminated C and D and our answer is either going to be A or B. So let's keep rolling through these. So looking at a after sensory transduction, we have affluent nerve and then CNS and that looks good to me, right? Remember afferent, we have our a words we have arrive, we have ascend. What we're seeing here is that that signal is going from our sensory receptor up the nerves of our peripheral nervous system and they're going up to our central nervous system. So that is what is happening just to understand and kind of um elaborate a little more on why B would be incorrect. B has step three as the efferent nerve and those are going to be used when our central nervous system has to send a message down to our peripheral nervous system to have some kind of motor activity happening. Um But this, we're talking here, we're talking about sensation. So it's going to be that affluent nerve and our answer is a. So there you go.
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Problem
Problem
Owen is a grad student who does research on sensory receptors. When classifying receptors, he organizes them based on if respond to external or internal stimuli. Owen is classifying receptors by:
A
Stimulus type.
B
Stimulus location.
C
Receptor structure.
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