Talk:Nerve tract

Latest comment: 1 year ago by UnderEducatedGeezer in topic Why are olfactory tracts called 'tracts'?

Contested deletion

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This article should not be speedy deleted as being recently created, having no relevant page history and duplicating an existing English Wikipedia topic, because...

This article is not a duplicate of the neural pathway article because it has a more specific subject, has more references than the other article, and does not have had the time to grow into a stub article.

--VeniVidiVicipedia (talk) 10:30, 1 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

How are nerve tract axons BUNDLED?

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It would appear to me that nerve tracts in the central nervous system might be structurally somewhat similar to the nerves in the peripheral nervous system, as both are referred to as 'bundles' of axons, but the article on nerves describes how they are bundled (epineurium, fascicles, perineurium, endoneurium), but I can't find out how (if at all) the axons in nerve tracts might be bundled. UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 03:39, 27 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Hello UnderEducatedGeezer - from what i understand - the nerves in the PNS have a needed 'bundling' of connective tissue components due to the length that they travel in the body. In the CNS this connective tissue protection is not needed - the tracts cover relatively short distances that are not impeded, traversed, etc by other components. It's just the numbers of axons involved (some hundreds of millions in the corpus callosum) that form the bundles as they make their connections between their partners or targets. You might find the page Tractography of help. Best --Iztwoz (talk) 09:41, 27 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Thanks @Iztwoz:, that makes a lot of sense. Tractography is pretty neat! It does nicely visually reinforce the idea that all the parts of the brain are really all connected & functioning at least somewhat all together. I hadn't started to look into all the tracts in the brain & spinal cord yet, don't know if I'll ever get to them, got a lot other neuro-things to try to learn about first, went from neurons to brain to spinal cord to nerves. Still wondering about the transition zone from spinal cord to nerves, how the meninges transition to neuria, presumably at the rootlets (found a picture at | NYSORA , at section "THE CENTRAL-PERIPHERAL TRANSITION REGION" ([1]) but don't yet understand it.). And I still suspect that there is likely something which holds the axons in tracts together in some way (if only oligodendrocytes), just like I had the same suspicion about synapses when I saw drawings of the axon terminal 'floating' a short distance from a dendritic spine; I kept thinking that there must be something that holds them together, even if they don't contact & share cytoplasm, otherwise a knock on the head would knock all ones synapses apart! And it took me quite a few months of on & off searching around the web before I finally found references to synaptic adhesion molecules & pictures. UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 11:40, 27 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Merging nerve fascicle with nerve tract page?

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I don't know a lot about this subject, but aren't they essentially the same thing? A funiculi is a bundle of axons, and a nerve tract is a collected bundle of axons? If they are not the same thing, then at least they are related, and might be mentioned within the page? I don't know, but hopefully someone smarter than me can do some clean-up/organization/connection of ideas/concepts.

Well, I don't know a lot about them either, but I know now that they're NOT the same thing! Nerves are organized into bundles of bundles, each bundle having their own connective tissue SHEATH (endoneurium around individual axons or group of small axons, perineurium around fascicles/bundles of axons, and epineurium around a bunch of fascicles), and tracts are not organized like that and have no sheaths that I am aware of. UnderEducatedGeezer (talk)

Why are olfactory tracts called 'tracts'?

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The olfactory tract is found outside the brain, in the groove of the olfactory sulcus, presumably covered by two of the meninges, and looks like it is substantial enough to be 'picked-up', like a nerve could be, so why is it named a tract? UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 04:31, 22 January 2023 (UTC)Reply