Nervous systems

One of the characteristics of higher animals is their possession of a more or less elaborate system for the rapid transfer of information through the body in the form of electrical signals, or nervous impulses. At the bottom of the evolutionary scale, the nervous system of some primitive invertebrates consists simply of an interconnected network of undifferentiated nerve cells. The next step in complexity is the division of the system into sensory nerves responsible for gathering incoming information, and motor nerves responsible for bringing about an appropriate response. The nerve cell bodies are grouped together to form ganglia. Specialized receptor organs are developed to detect every kind of change in the external and internal environment; and likewise there are various types of effector organ formed by muscles and glands, to which the outgoing instructions are channelled. In invertebrates, the ganglia which serve to link the inputs and outputs remain to some extent anatomically separate, but in vertebrates the bulk of the nerve cell bodies are collected together in the central nervous system. The peripheral nervous system thus consists of afferent sensory nerves conveying information to the central nervous system, and efferent motor nerves conveying instructions from it. Within the central nervous system, the different pathways are connected up by large numbers of interneurons which have an integrative function.