Abstract
THE fourth Victor Horsley Memorial Lecture was delivered on July 20 in the Medical School of University College Hospital by Prof. E. D. Adrian, who discussed the Visceral Sense Organs. The action of the sense organs in the lungs and in the great blood vessels can be studied by recording the nervous messages which they send to the brain stem, a method made possible by the use of valve amplification to magnify the electric changes in the sensory nerve fibres. The normal sensory discharges in the vagus and carotid sinus nerves were demonstrated by gramophone records in which the nerve impulses were converted into sounds varying in pitch with the frequency of the discharge. The sense organs in the lung resemble the muscle spindles, giving a rhythmic discharge of impulses so long as the tissues are stretched. In normal breathing the discharge only occurs at inspiration, but there are some endings which are excited by collapse of the lung, and these may be the cause of rapid breathing in pathological conditions. The sense organs in the aorta and sinus caroticus behave like those in the lung and give a faithful signal of the blood pressure. Both systems act as governors to keep the respiratory and vascular systems working within safe limits, and, as with all sense organs, their effect depends upon messages which are graded by changes in impulse frequency and in the number of units in action.
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Visceral Sense Organs. Nature 130, 123 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130123b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130123b0