While anatomy involves identifying body parts and where they are found, physiology is concerned with how those body parts work. It makes it a bit easier to grasp the anatomy of the neuron if we talk about some physiology first. So, while we’ll use an image of the prototypical neuron that is most likely to appear in a textbook in this article, just remember that the brain contains a wide array of neurons, and most of them look quite different from this one. There are neurons that have so many processes extending from them that they look like little bushes (Purkinje cells), others that look a bit like baskets (basket cells), and many others. There are tiny neurons of microscopic lengths and there are neurons that stretch to a meter (about 3 feet) long. That’s because neurons come in all shapes and sizes. It’s important to mention, though, that while there are neurons in your brain that might vaguely resemble the one in the image, there are many more that don’t. This is the image we’ll be using for our discussion of the neuron in this article. If you look in any neuroscience textbook, you’ll likely see an image of a neuron that looks something like the image to the right.
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