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Advanced question - nerve impulses

A quick question, it is probably not in any of the a-level syllabuses but just out of interest

Say for example in the action "I'm going to lift my arm up" where does the initial nerve impulse come from that is then conveyed down the nerves to the muscles via synapses etc.

Or is it a lot more complicated than that/not fully understood or known?
Very complicated. The motor cortex in the brain gives some nerve fibres that then synapses with the motor neurone in the spine is the short answer. How the motor cortex "decides" to do this is a lot more complicated. There's a huge interplay between the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the basal ganglia, the cerebellum and the prefrontal cortex that then tells the primary motor cortex what to do. If you're interested in this you can read up about what each of these areas do (eg. "remembering" patterns of movements, controlling different motions, actual decision making etc.) but this is more getting towards degree level stuff, particularly if you want to understand it rather than knowing a list of what we think everything does.

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