A ‘late supernormal period’ in the recovery of excitability following an action potential in muscle spindle and tendon organ receptors

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Abstract
1. Discharge patterns have been recorded from five types of stretch receptor; frog muscle spindles, lizard tendon organs, cat soleus tendon organs and primary and secondary endings of cat soleus muscle spindles. 2. The fully adapted discharge of each type of receptor is irregular, especially for frog spindles and primary endings of cat spindles as compared with the other three types (the ‘regularly firing’ receptors). Frog spindles and some cat spindle primary endings would maintain a discharge at very low mean rates (1/sec or less) while the remaining receptors would stop suddenly, as soon as their rate of discharge fell below a critical value characteristic for each individual ending. 3. This pattern of discharge suggests that there is a peak in the excitability of ‘regularly firing’ receptors at a time following a preceding impulse, which corresponds to the intervals between impulses at each particular receptor's slowest rate of maintained firing, and that the excitability subsequently falls again. Primary endings of cat muscle spindles also showed some evidence of such a ‘late supernormal period’, but frog spindles did not. 4. Direct evidence for the ‘late supernormal period’ was obtained from experiments in which a maintained discharge was restarted by an antidromic action potential in a receptor which had stopped firing, and to which had been applied a stretch just too small to restart the discharge. 5. It is shown in an Appendix that a model receptor in which the recovery of excitability following an impulse has a hyperbolic time course, and in which Gaussian distributed noise is superimposed on the generator potential, can have a discharge pattern very closely resembling that of a frog spindle (cf. Buller, 1965). 6. After addition of a late supernormal period to the model, its discharge pattern could mimic closely that of a lizard or cat tendon organ, or of a secondary ending of a cat spindle.