This and my other scientific images have now been moved over to Sketchy Medicine.com, my new website dedicate exclusively to scientific and medical images!

See it there!

The way our curriculum is set up, sometimes we need to know things that we won’t officially learn until next year. For example, right now we’re in pharm, but we’re talking about analgesics and how/where they work. It makes things a little bit more difficult when up until this point the brain has pretty much been a vacant circle at the top of a tube with neurons (ouuu). Since I actually have the benefit of knowing that the brain is further subdivided into at least a couple other blobs within that circle, I dug out the ole’ neuroanatomy textbook and redrew on of the pathways that was causing major headaches (myself included). Seriously, there are so many double/triple/quadruple negatives in this pathway it makes the head spin. Who knew that the activation of the inhibitory interneuron would inhibit the other inhibitory interneuron, releasing inhibition of another neuron only to inhibit pain?

So here’s the periaquaductal grey pathway in all of its cartoon glory. Yes, I realize that I didn’t really draw the medulla and totally left out the pons. No one like them anyways. For a printable version, here is the PDF.

P.S. I wrote the text, so it’s probably riddled with spelling errors and other typos. C’est la vie.