Think of your brain. Inside that four-pound organ sitting inside your skull is a root and branch system of truly biblical proportions. Hundreds of billions of brain cells called neurons stretch toward each other with rootlike growths called axons and dendrites. Close as they might get, the tiny nerve endings of one axon never touch those of the dendrites branching toward it. Instead, memories and other thoughts have to hurdle what are called synaptic gaps.
Information just can t get from one neuron to the other.
And that means memories, though stored throughout your brain, are just out of reach. You know that if you have a phone, I can call you, says Michael Ebadi, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology and neurology at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine in Omaha. But if you don t have a phone, there s nothing I can do. That s the way it is with neurotransmitters. In order for things to occur, you know you need transmitters.