Striated muscles perform adjustments to an organism in response to its external environment. The muscles effect change through contraction by bending the skeletal structure, to which the muscles are attached by tendons, at moveable joints in the structure. The cells of smooth muscle , which forms the walls of many internal organs as well as the walls of arteries and veins, have one nucleus each and lack striation. The individual cells or fibers of smooth muscle are long, thin, and pointed at their ends. The fibers are generally interwoven to form sheets instead of bundles as in striated muscle.
Smooth muscle is stimulated by the autonomic nervous system.
Smooth muscle is also able to contract without nervous stimulation as in the peristaltic movement of the intestine tract, for example. Smooth muscle carries out adjustments to an organism's internal environment. Specialized regions of cardiac muscle spontaneously contract in the absence of nervous impulses, though such impulses may modify the automatic rhythm. Under normal circumstances, the impulses that cause cardiac muscle contraction originate from specialized cardiac muscle cells, not in the nervous system. The junction of two closely fused cell walls is the intercalated disc .