I always get confused between the following four terms, can someone clarify for me?
Autonomic nervous system vs somatic nervous system vs sympathetic nervous system vs parasympathetic nervous system
This is actually pretty easy, hope this helps!
🙂
Are you watching closely
OK. Everything is broken down into pairs. There are 2 nervous systems:
Peripheral and Central
The meaning of peripheral is outside or around.
The meaning of central would be inside or in the middle.
SO what does each do?
The central is comprised of things inside or in the middle, brain/spinal cord/etc.
The peripheral controls that which is outside. SENSES (sensory info comes from outside) MUSCLES (to affect the outside world)
OK. The central has no parts. The Peripheral has 2 parts
Peripheral's 2 parts:
Somatic and Autonomic
Somatic has the root word soma which in greek means body. Therefore this is the BODY nervous system. It controls all your conscious muscle movements. BODY movements that are conscious.
Auto - Automatic - happening on its own. This is the "happening on its own" system, or the one that works unconsciously. This controls smooth muscle (internal muscles like digestive system or veins/arteries).
Autonomic will have 2 parts. Somatic, Just like central has no sub-categories.
Autonomic's 2 parts:
Sympathetic and Parasympathetic
Just memorize these 2.
Sympathetic is FIGHT OR FLIGHT
Parasympathetic is REST and DIGEST
It actually is pretty complicated to determine which functions of the body are controlled by each. It isn't always as simple as me saying ____ body function and you saying sympathetic or parasympathetic. BUT GOOD NEWS! you don't need to memorize all the functions of each. Instead you should understand the basic idea that one will respond to danger and the other one will respond to being in a rebuilding or resting state. Would you want to synthesize muscle during PANIC? nope. Think like that.
Pupils dilate? Cardiovascular system more active (heart rate)? Stress? Sympathetic
one may think of the sympathetic division as the accelerator and the parasympathetic division as the brake. The sympathetic division typically functions in actions requiring quick responses. The parasympathetic division functions with actions that do not require immediate reaction.
If you understand what I have said then you likely know enough for the MCAT.
Lets review:
NERVOUS SYSTEM
- CENTRAL (inner/middle)
- PERIPHERAL (outer)
- SOMATIC (body)
- AUTONOMIC
- SYMPATHETIC (ForF)
- PARASYMPATHETIC (R&D)
