I just read How does an inhibitory synapse communicate to the cell body of a neuron? and found myself asking this question ... hopefully I'm not asking the same thing
Any body possessed of a nervous system probably has hundreds of neurons. At one end of the neuron is the nervous system, at the other - the organ.
A neuron is connected to several others in the vicinity through it's dendrites. When a 'signal' (for want of better word) is put on the system bus - how does a neuron know whether it has to act ( contract/relax it's associated muscle/organ ) on the signal, or pass it on ( forward ) after amplification of the signal, if necessary?
Is there something like a chemical protocol to identify the target neuron/group-of-neurons that form the destination?
Answer
An analogy to a computer bus can easily mislead you. Neurons do not communicated via a multiplexed "bus" with different targets; rather the complex connectivity of the neurons itself works as a computing device as a whole. The area study for understanding the communication among neurons is called "neural coding".
If you are talking about just the motor and sensory peripheral nerves, they innervate specific targets.
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