Synapses – What Are They and How Do They Work?

Every feature of ourselves that allows us to live as human beings is governed by our nervous system. It is not only responsible for our consciousness, but we also rely on it when we see, feel, listen, or move. Moreover, our nervous system controls most other functions of our body, such as our digestive system or our heart and blood circulation, which we become aware of only when something goes wrong.
Our brain is the master of our nervous system. It receives all signals from the outside or from other parts of our bodies, processes them, and governs the «output» which summarizes everything that is initiated by the brain, whether it be a movement, a change in our mood, or a new idea. How this happens is still fascinating for a large community of biologists, neuroscientists, physicists, and medical doctors. Despite more than one hundred years of research and enormous progress, particularly in the past few decades, we have only just begun to scratch the surface in our understanding of this miracle of evolution.