All Or None Law Research Paper

The All-or-none law is the principle that the strength by which a nerve or muscle fiber responds to a stimulus is independent of the strength of the stimulus. If that stimulus exceeds the threshold potential, the nerve or muscle fiber will give a complete response; otherwise, there is no response. It was first established by the American physiologist Henry Pickering Bowditch in 1871 for the contraction of heart muscle. According to him, describing the relation of response to stimulus, “An induction shock produces the muscle at the time. “The individual fibers of both skeletal muscle and nerve respond to stimulation according to the all-or-none principle. The All or none Law is also known as the Bowditch Law To fully understand the All or none law, it is deemed necessary to understand the relationship between stimulus and response .A stimulus is generally, an electrical action from the brain and spinal cord to trigger a desired motion by the nervous system into prime movers fibres and the response is that of a contraction of certain desired muscle, its fibres and the skeletal muscles altogether. The stimulus is an action of the nervous system and the response is another action from the muscular system. It emphasizes the co-ordination of two different system in the body such that the minimum stimulus needed to produce a response will always respond to that stimulus …show more content…
This will determine the force that can be generated within the muscle. The greater the strength required, the greater the number of motor units (and therefore the number of muscle fibres) that contract. Stimuli too weak to produce a spike do, however, set up a local electrotonus, the magnitude of the electronic potential progressively increasing with the strength of the stimulus, until a spike is generated. This demonstrates the all-or-none relationship in spike