Skip to content

References: Neurons, Glia, and the Nervous System

  1. Brain Basics: The Life and Death of a Neuron - National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NIH) - A plain-language tour of the parts of a neuron, the three kinds of neurons (sensory, motor, interneuron), and glial support cells. It is a great first read if this chapter is your first look at brain cells.

  2. 1.1 Building a Nervous System - OpenStax, Introduction to Behavioral Neuroscience (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) - A free, open college textbook section covering neurons, dendrites and axons, the main types of glia, myelin, and the blood-brain barrier. It goes one step deeper than this chapter, so it suits students who want more detail.

  3. Multiple Sclerosis (MS) - National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NIH) - The government's overview of MS: how the immune system attacks myelin, the types of MS, early symptoms such as optic neuritis, how doctors diagnose it with MRI and other tests, and current treatments. It is the main source for this chapter's Bedside case.

  4. Guillain-Barré Syndrome - National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NIH) - Explains a rare disorder in which the immune system attacks the peripheral nerves, often their myelin. Reading it next to the MS page shows how the same kind of damage looks different in the PNS than in the CNS.

  5. The Search for True Numbers of Neurons and Glial Cells in the Human Brain: A Review of 150 Years of Cell Counting - von Bartheld, Bahney, and Herculano-Houzel, Journal of Comparative Neurology (2016), free on PubMed Central - A review that traces where the "ten glia for every neuron" claim came from and shows that the real ratio is about one to one or a little less. It is a good example of how science corrects a "fact" that textbooks repeated for decades.

  6. The Prevalence of MS in the United States: A Population-Based Estimate Using Health Claims Data - Wallin et al., Neurology (2019), free on PubMed Central - The study behind this chapter's estimate that about 727,000 U.S. adults were living with MS in 2010 (extended, with a caution from the authors, to roughly 850,000 to 914,000 by 2017), with women affected about 2.8 times as often as men. The abstract shows how researchers count a disease across a whole country.

  7. Epstein-Barr Virus May Be Leading Cause of Multiple Sclerosis - Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2022) - A readable news summary of the Science study that followed more than 10 million young adults in the U.S. military and found that MS risk rose 32-fold after Epstein-Barr virus infection. It shows how a long-term study can point toward the cause of a disease.

  8. Conduction Velocity and Myelin - Introduction to Sensation and Perception, University of Minnesota open textbook - A short, clear page on why thick, myelinated axons carry signals much faster than thin, bare ones, with speeds compared to walking and race cars. It also briefly discusses diseases that strip myelin.

  9. Do People Only Use 10 Percent of Their Brains? - Scientific American (2008) - Two neurologists explain why the "10 percent" claim is a myth, using evidence from brain imaging and brain injury. It is useful practice in checking a popular brain claim against evidence.

  10. Glia - Wikipedia - An overview of all the major kinds of glial cells, their jobs, and the history of their discovery by Rudolf Virchow. Use it as a starting point and follow its cited sources for details.