Action
The palatine velum is slightly raised by the levator veli palatini and made tense by the tensor veli palatini; the palatopharyngeus muscles, by their contraction, pull the pharynx upward over the bolus of food and nearly come together, the uvula filling up the slight interval between them.
By these means the bolus is prevented from passing into the nasopharynx; at the same time, the palatopharyngeus muscles form an inclined plane, directed obliquely downward and backward, along the under surface of which the bolus descends into the lower part of the pharynx.
Read more about this topic: Palatopharyngeus Muscle
Famous quotes containing the word action:
“Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“Without our being especially conscious of the transition, the word “parent” has gradually come to be used as much as a verb as a noun. Whereas we formerly thought mainly about “being a parent,” we now find ourselves talking about learning how “to parent.” . . . It suggests that we may now be concentrating on action rather than status, on what we do rather than what or who we are.”
—Bettye M. Caldwell (20th century)