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I agree with you, Michelle. Thinking about thoughts and emotions as outputs with no outside stimulus makes more sense than the more traditional stimulus/response framework. Sure, often there must be an external stimuli, such as a word a question to give one inspiration or to spur on something; but, the act of physically forming a thought, emotion, or even a dream being independent of an external stimulus makes sense to me. I often think in tangents, so knowing we have an infinite number of neuronal connections within our brains models my thinking patterns: as one neuron leads to the next, one thought leads to the next. An "adaptive value" for the NS to be able to generate outputs by itself is that the NS can act on its own, and can allow for individuality among creatures of the same species. The NS is not just a one dimensional responsive machine, but is more like a dynamic shape-shifter! If there was only one response for one stimulus, our lives would be much more boring because certain things could be predicted and people would be more similar. But because each person has their own set of neuronal connections and because the brain can create its own outputs based on these distinct connections, past experiences, evolution, and learned patterns, we can each be our own self!

One thing I was a little confused about in lecture this week was when Professor Grobstein mentioned that our brains are 99.9999999% interneurons, which implies that we are less constrained by the outside world than we think we are. I understand that sensory and motor neurons are responsible for our interactions with the world, and since they only make up an extremely small percent of our neurons, it can be said that our interactions with the outside world are actually very limited. But, most of what we do and think is based on past experiences and learned patterns which we acquire by means of our motor and sensory neurons. So, don't our interneurons rely deeply on the information we receive from the outside world?