How does hypothalamus communicate and integrate signals.
Answers
✍️ The hypothalamus is a tiny part of the brain of vertebrate animals.
✍️ In humans it weighs about four grams in a brain that weighs on average 1,400 grams.
✍️ Despite its small size, the hypothalamus plays a pivotal role in an astounding number of functional and behavioral activities that are essential for day-to-day survival of the individual animal (or person) and for continuing survival of its species.
✍️ Its overall role is to collect and integrate a huge variety of information from the body and to organize neural and endocrine responses that maintain homeostasis .
✍️ About ten or eleven small, indistinct nuclei (nerve cell groups) are packed into the hypothalamus.
✍️ Reflecting their complex and highly specialized functions, the cells here use several unusual means of cell-to-cell communication.
✍️ Some hypothalamic cells are specialized to detect the presence and the concentration of large molecules such as hormones circulating in the blood and tissue fluids.
✍️ They are able to do this because even the capillaries here are specialized. Unlike other brain vessels, they permit large molecules like hormones to leak into the tissues and carry signals to the neurons .
✍️ Hypothalamic neurons also receive information from other body and brain areas by way of electrical impulses conducted from many sensory sources (signaling pain, vision, and blood pressure, for example) scattered through the body.
✍️ Other hypothalamic neurons respond by changing their firing pattern when there are changes in the desired values of variables such as blood temperature,glucose concentration, or salt concentrations in the body fluids.
