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Welcome to the on-line forum associated with the Biology 202 at Bryn Mawr College. Its a way to keep conversations going between course meetings, and to do so in a way that makes our conversations available to other who may in turn have interesting thoughts to contribute to them. Leave whatever thoughts in progress you think might be useful to others, see what other people are thinking, and add thoughts that that in turn generates in you.

You're free to write about whatever came into your mind this week, but if you need something to get you started ...

Our abbreviated week focused largely on the idea that the nervous system can generate outputs even when there is no perturbation in its surroundings (no "input" that "causes" the output).  What aspects of behavior might be more easily made sense of in this rather than in a more traditional a stimlus/response framework?  What "adaptive value" might there be in the nervous system being able to generate outputs by itself rather than in response to inputs?  What could such a nervous system do that it couldn't do without the ability to generate outputs by itself?