Transmitters activate the synapses, electrical junctions in the body that stimulate the brain, nerves, and muscle cells to become active and communicate.
Motor neurones also form specialized synapses with secretory cells.
It has been urged that the neurons retract during sleep, and that thus at the synapses the gap between nerve cell and nerve cell becomes wider, or that the supporting cells expand between the nerve cells and tend to isolate the latter one from the other.
Each pad is also connected to many others, like branches on a tree (or synapses in the brain).
Crucial to this process is a protein called the NMDA receptor, which sits at synapses in the central nervous system.
