Neurons
This is how I would explain the electro-chemical interaction between neurons to a friend.
Imagine standing in a giant room with a large number of other people -- each of you are holding your arms out to either side of your body, like Leonardo Da Vinci's drawing of "Vitruvian Man." The giant room corresponds the brain and the nervous system, and you and the other people are each individual neurons. You have your arms out to either side because neuron cells have a long and skinny central body called the "axon"-so the length of your extended arms corresponds to this part of the neuron -- with receptor areas on either end that have fingerlike filaments, called "dendrites." In reality the field would have to be unebelivably large to actually be equivalent to the brain and nervous, which has billions of neurons. And everybody's fingers would have to be very long, because sometimes dendrites can be exceptionally long.
So imagine that all of the people in the field with their arms out, twiddling their fingers, never actually touching fingers. In other words, the communication occurs without touching, and the communication occurs in one direction: so there's a difference between your left and right hand. In a neuron, the dendrites on one end of the axon contain a cell-body called a "soma" -- let's call this the right hand -- while the other end, your left hand, only contains dendrites, and this...
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