Hey all, I’m a neuroscience grad student bored as hell while working on research, AMA
What kind of grad program are you in where you’re bored as hell?? I’ve never met a grad student with any kind of free time
I’m in the +1 portion of my 4+1 program. We’re researching how attention and sensory input changes time perception, which includes our participant sitting in room doing nothing for an hour as a baseline, so we get more downtime than we’d like sometimes lmao.
In the brain, we seem to have numerous analog chemical systems that kinda operate alongside our binary on/off neurons. Things like hormone levels, that can create a shift in how other interactions play out across the system as a whole, in a sliding gradient as opposed simple on/off.
Roughly how many of these (edit: central-)nervous-system-wide analog communication systems are there?
That’s a hard question because of the interconnected-ness and complexity of the systems but I’ll give it a shot.
Neurotransmitters: ~30
Neuromodulators: ~10-20 (some transmitters also act as modulators)
Hormones: 10
Growth Factors: ~5
Endocannabinoids: 2
Gaseous Neurotransmitters: 2
Peptides: ~30
Ion concentrations: ~5
So all that together I want to say there’s about 100 or so distinct “analog” signaling systems, but a lot of these molecules can function in multiple capacities, like neurotransmitters can act as neuromodulators and etc.
Thank you, that is exactly the kind of ballpark answer I was looking for. That’s honestly less than I was expecting, I can actually wrap my head around 100ish chemical signaling systems.