Afferent pathways

In the nervous system, afferent neurons--otherwise known as sensory or receptor neurons--carry nerve impulses from receptors or sense organs toward the central nervous system. This term is can also be used to describe relative connections between nervous structures.

A touch or painful stimulus, for example, creates a sensation in the brain only after information about the stimulus travels there via afferent nerve pathways. The structure of an afferent neuron contains a single long dendrite and a short axon; the shape of the cell body of an afferent neuron is smooth and rounded. In the spinal cord, thousands of afferent neurons are aggregated in a sweeling in the dorsal root known as the dorsal root ganglion

An easy mnemonic device for remembering the relationship between afferent and efferent is that an afferent connection arrives and an efferent connection exits.

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