Why is an action potential an all or none response to stimuli?
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Organizational Behavior: Managing People and Organizations13th EditionJean Phillips, Ricky W. Griffin, Stanley Gully 174 solutions This article is about the physiological principle. For the finance term, see All or none. For the mathematical term, see Zero–one law. In physiology, the all-or-none law (sometimes the all-or-none principle or all-or-nothing law) is the principle that if a single nerve fibre is stimulated, it will always give a maximal response and produce an electrical impulse of a single amplitude. If the intensity or duration of the stimulus is increased, the height of the impulse will remain the same. The nerve fibre either gives a maximal response or none at all. It was first established by the American physiologist Henry Pickering Bowditch in 1871 for the contraction of heart muscle.
This principle was later found to be present in skeletal muscle by Keith Lucas in 1909.[1] The individual fibres of nerves also respond to stimulation according to the all-or-none principle.[2] Isolation of the action potential[edit]The first recorded time of isolating a single action potential was carried out by Edgar Adrian in 1925 from a set of crosscut muscle fibres. Using a thermionic triode valve amplifier with 1850 amplification, Adrian noticed that when the muscle preparation was left to hang, it produced oscillations; yet when supported, no such activity occurred.[3] Later with the help of Yngve Zotterman, Adrian isolated and stimulated one sensory fibre. The impulses externally on the fibre were uniform: “as simple as the dots in Morse code”. Stimulus strength was manipulated and the resulting frequency measured, yielding a relationship where f∝sn[further explanation needed]. [4] Relationship between stimulus and response[edit]As long as the stimulus reaches the threshold, the full response would be given. Larger stimulus does not result in a larger response, vice versa.[5]: 31 The magnitude of the action potential set up in any single nerve fibre is independent of the strength of the exciting stimulus, provided the latter is adequate. An electrical stimulus below threshold strength fails to elicit a propagated spike potential. If it is of threshold strength or over, a spike (a nervous impulse) of maximum magnitude is set up. Either the single fibre does not respond with spike production, or it responds to the utmost of its ability under the conditions at the moment. This property of the single nerve fibre is termed the all-or-none relationship. This relationship holds only for the unit of tissue; for nervous tissue the unit is the nerve cell, for skeletal muscle the unit is the individual muscle fiber and for the heart the unit is the entire auricles or the entire ventricles. Stimuli too weak to produce a spike do, however, set up a local electrotonus, the magnitude of the electronic potential progressively increasing with the strength of the stimulus, until a spike is generated. This demonstrates the all-or-none relationship in spike production. The above account deals with the response of a single nerve fibre. If a nerve trunk is stimulated, then as the exciting stimulus is progressively increased above a threshold, a larger number of fibres respond. The minimal effective (i.e., threshold) stimulus is adequate only for fibres of high excitability, but a stronger stimulus excites all the nerve fibres. Increasing the stimulus further does increase the response of whole nerve. Heart muscle is excitable, i.e., it responds to external stimuli by contracting. If the external stimulus is too weak, no response is obtained; if the stimulus is adequate, the heart responds to the best of its ability. Accordingly, the auricles or ventricles behave as a single unit, so that an adequate stimulus normally produces a full contraction of either the auricles or ventricles. The force of the contraction obtained depends on the state in which the muscles fibres find themselves. In the case of muscle fibres, the individual muscle fibre does not respond at all if the stimulus is too weak. However, it responds maximally when the stimulus rises to threshold. The contraction is not increased if the stimulus strength is further raised. Stronger stimuli bring more muscle fibres into action and thus the tension of a muscle increases as the strength of the stimulus applied to it rises. See also[edit]
References[edit]
Why is an action potential an all or none response quizlet?Why is an action potential an all-or-none response? The action potential is an all-or-none response because the cause of the action potential is the influx of sodium ions into the cell through the voltage-gated channels. These channels can be either open or closed.
How is action potential all or none?Action potentials are considered an “all-or nothing” event, in that, once the threshold potential is reached, the neuron always completely depolarizes. Once depolarization is complete, the cell must now “reset” its membrane voltage back to the resting potential.
Does action potential obey all or none law?The action potential (spike) obeys the all or none law.
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