The leech nervous system consists of a brain connected to a ventral nerve cord. This nerve cord is further made up of segmental ganglia (Titlow, 2013). Within each ganglia are many other types of cells that can be distinguished by their general properties and by the electrical signals that they initiate (Titlow,2013). Titlow’s experiment classified some of these types of cells based on their general properties: R-Retzius cells, P- pressure, T- touch, N-nociceptive, AE- annulus erector (2013). In this experiment we dissected a leech ganglia microscopically in order to make intracellular recordings from inside of individual cells. Part of this process included stimulating the neurons with an electrode under various stimulus conditions, such as long pulses, short pulses, and multiple short pulses in a short duration of time. With the results of this experiment, we were able to determine the type of cell that we had penetrated within the leech ganglia, based on the electrical signals that they sent and …show more content…
This was done by recording action potential frequency after various magnitudes of current stimulating the cell. We initially started with 0.4 nA of current, and increased the magnitude of this current by 2 nA every trial. Figure 4 shows a graph generated to show the frequency of action potentials generated in response to varying current magnitudes. This graph appears to show a number of outliers in the data, with random variations throughout the graph. However, the data also gives the idea of a general upward trend when comparing action potential frequency generated in response to increasing current magnitudes. Perhaps if more trials had been conducted, there could have been a more linear relationship between the magnitude of the stimulus current and the number of action potentials generated by the