Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Directed away from a central organ or section.
- adjective Carrying impulses from the central nervous system to an effector.
- noun An efferent organ or body part, such as a blood vessel.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Conveying outward or away; deferent: as, the efferent nerves, which convey a nervous impulse from the ganglionic center outward to the muscles or other active tissue.
- noun In anatomy and physiology, a vessel or nerve which conveys outward.
- noun A river flowing from and bearing away the waters of a lake.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Conveying outward, or discharging; -- applied to certain blood vessels, lymphatics, nerves, etc.
- adjective Conveyed outward; ; -- opposed to
afferent . - noun An efferent duct or stream.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Carrying
away from. - noun A
duct orstream that carries away.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a nerve that conveys impulses toward or to muscles or glands
- adjective of nerves and nerve impulses; conveying information away from the CNS
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The fibres which come ultimately from the ventral aspect of the spinal marrow, are those which carry an influence outwards, and produce a contraction in the muscles, and are therefore called efferent or motor.
The Common Frog 1874
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Whatever the specifics, they wrote, the important thing is that the stimulation affected only “a few cubic millimeters of neural tissue,” which means that “the depression probably resulted from the stimulation of afferent, efferent, or passing fibers within the substantia nigra or from the inhibition of those fibers.”
MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010
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The PNS contains two forms of nerves: afferent nerves, which relay sensory information to the CNS, and efferent nerves, which relay motor commands from the CNS to various muscles and glands.
Neurotoxicity 2008
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The second efferent system is the autonomic nervous system, which carries motor information to smooth muscles, cardiac muscle, and various glands.
Neurotoxicity 2008
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Her stances were aesthetic and efferent, the former being reading for emotional/artistic reasons and the latter for informational reasons.
While Cathy Adores the Minuet Roger Sutton 2006
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Motor neurons make up the efferent neurons of both the somatic and autonomic nervous systems.
Neurotoxicity 2008
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Human gustatory representations are points in a four-dimensional state space, with each dimension coding for activity rates generated by gustatory stimuli in each type of taste receptor (sweet, salty, sour, bitter) and their segregated efferent pathways.
The Philosophy of Neuroscience Bickle, John 2006
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Each dimension corresponds to activity rates in one of three classes of photoreceptors present in the human retina and their efferent paths: the red-green opponent pathway, yellow-blue opponent pathway, and black-white (contrast) opponent pathway.
The Philosophy of Neuroscience Bickle, John 2006
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Another thought experiment (Kirk 1974b) involves a team of micro-Lilliputians who invade Gulliver™s head, disconnect his afferent and efferent nerves, monitor the inputs from his afferent nerves, and send outputs down his efferent nerves to produce behavior indistinguishable from what it would have been originally.
Zombies Kirk, Robert 2006
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The boat's central director-essentially a computer whose input came from the instruments and whose efferent impulses went directly to the controls-performed the basic operations.
Explorations ANDERSON, Poul 1981
artoparts commented on the word efferent
See: afferent
October 31, 2008