cranial nerves
Cranial Nerves The nerves attached to the brain are the cranial nerves, which are primarily responsible for the sensory and motor functions of the head and neck one of these nerves targets organs in the thoracic and abdominal cavities as part of the parasympathetic nervous system . There are twelve cranial nerves, which are designated CNI through CNXII for Cranial Nerve, using Roman numerals for 1 through 12. They can be classified as sensory nerves, motor nerves, or a combination of both, meaning that the axons in these nerves originate out of sensory ganglia external to the cranium or motor nuclei within the brain stem. Sensory axons enter the brain to synapse in a nucleus. Motor axons connect to skeletal muscles of the head or neck. Three of the nerves are solely composed of sensory fibers; five are strictly motor; and the remaining four are mixed nerves. Learning the cranial nerves is a tradition in anatomy courses, and students have always used mnemonic devices to remember the nerve names. A traditional mnemonic is the rhyming couplet, On Old Olympus Towering Tops/A Finn And German Viewed Some Hops, in which the initial letter of each word corresponds to the initial letter in the name of each nerve. The names of the nerves have changed over the years to reflect current usage and more accurate naming. An exercise to help learn this sort of information is to generate a mnemonic using words that have personal significance. The names of the cranial nerves are listed in Table 13.3 along with a brief description of their function, their source sensory ganglion or.