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Comprehensive Human Physiology pp 911–934Cite as

Physiology of Skeletal Muscle

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Abstract

Motility is a widespread biological phenomenon that reaches its highest manifestation in the specialized tissue of muscle. Its particular function is vital to animal life, though it also serves vegetative functions as well. Animal functions are based upon the property of excitability and its conduction, as already described for nerve cells and their filamentous extensions (see Chaps. 13, 14). Skeletal and heart muscles are also excitable, but their stimulation is intimately linked to a secondary response, that of contraction. Thus, skeletal muscle is the major executive arm of the nervous system, primarily in regard to motor activity. However, muscle is also the means of expression of higher functions of the brain, of which we would have no knowledge if they were not communicated by muscles, which express our “mental” activities by speech, song, and cries, by writing, by gestures and facial expressions, and by more complex forms of behavior, both sessile or locomotory, individual or social.

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Authors
  1. U. Windhorst
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  2. W. F. H. M. Mommaerts
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Physiologisches Institut, Universität Freiburg, Hermann-Herder-Str. 7, 79104, Freiburg, Germany

    Rainer Greger

  2. Faculty of Medicine, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Calgary, 3330 Hospital Drive N.W., T2N 4N1, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

    Uwe Windhorst

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Windhorst, U., Mommaerts, W.F.H.M. (1996). Physiology of Skeletal Muscle. In: Greger, R., Windhorst, U. (eds) Comprehensive Human Physiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60946-6_46

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