Functions
The section "Areas of Electrical Coupling" reflects the circumstances of earliest discovery of gap junctions and their function in allowing the transmission electrical impulses among cells at levels that elicit responses from their neighboring cells. The transmission of a nerve impulse and the contraction of muscle are relatively easily detected and quantified experimentally. "Areas of Electrical Coupling" also touches upon the retinal gap junctions which could be seen as specialist nerve cells. Many new functions for gap junctions have been uncovered since those early years.
Read more about this topic: Gap Junction
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others’. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery—more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)