Neurons

This is how I would explain the electro-chemical interaction between neurons to a friend.

Imagine standing in a giant room with a large number of other people -- each of you are holding your arms out to either side of your body, like Leonardo Da Vinci's drawing of "Vitruvian Man." The giant room corresponds the brain and the nervous system, and you and the other people are each individual neurons. You have your arms out to either side because neuron cells have a long and skinny central body called the "axon"-so the length of your extended arms corresponds to this part of the neuron -- with receptor areas on either end that have fingerlike filaments, called "dendrites." In reality the field would have to be unebelivably large to actually be equivalent to the brain and nervous, which has billions of neurons. And everybody's fingers would have to be very...
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