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I was talking to a friend about the ouput without an input phenomenon and she suggested I check out this New York Times post, Patient Voices: Tourette's Syndrome: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/11/health/healthguide/TE_tourettes.html.  She thought that this post suggested that Tourette's Syndrome, a disease characterized by involuntary movements and vocalizations (outputs), did have associated inputs.  For example, one individual commented that specific people and locations prompted particular inappropraite tics or outbursts.  He said that when he encountered certain races he felt the urge to vocalize racial slurs.  Further, he felt the urge to say degrading things to his girlfriends such as "you're fat".  Also, in public locations he would shout "bomb" or something else he knew would elicit a startled response.  This would suggest that the environment, particular locations and people, provide particular inputs that generate related (and unfortunately oftentimes inappropriate) outputs.  Sometimes, however, it is a fortunate output.  One patient spoke of how acting and performing caused the involuntary movements to stop.  I have witnessed this.  I knew a guy who twitched uncontrollably and then he would sit at a piano bench, start playing, and then the tics would instanteously stop.  How is music, an input, inteferring with the neuronal connections?  It must be interferring with something, with some input.  Additionally, another Tourette's Syndrome patient expressed that stress and excitement definitely factored into the prevalence and severity of the tics.  However, despite these environmental factors, there are clearly still outputs that cannot be accounted for or that do not have an associated identified input.  We do not yet know from where these outputs stem, but I think it completely probable to say that perhaps there are inputs engendering these responses that we have not been able to pinpoint.  We learned in class that our nervous system is comprised of 99.999999% interneurons.  This is amazing and daunting because think of the limitless amount of things these interneurons are doing.  I think it is entirely possible that in the case of Tourette's Syndrome and other disorders of the nervous system, we have yet to discover the inputs that cause these oftentimes visible and mysterious behaviors.  Why did I just blink, or wiggle my toes, or bite my lip?  I have no idea.  Maybe environmental factors or restlessness or boredom.  Something though, I think, elicted that response whether I know what that something is or not.  The featured Tourette's patients do not fully know where their responses are coming from either.  Many experience frustruation with the lack of control or lack of free will.  Some admitted that they did have control over urges, but that to supress these urges caused physical pain and mental anguish.  I also found it interesting that obsessive compulsive disorder is a common partner with Tourette's syndrome.  It almost seems like compensation for the fact that since they have no control over parts of themselves, they try to control other situations.  Is Tourette's syndrome the input for the obsessive compulsive output?  Further, a point of interest was the fact that two twins had the disorder - one experienced tics that diminished with age, while the other experienced an increase in the severity of tics.  Does this suggest environmental inputs?  Lastly, one patient said that the one thing that helped the tics was marijuana.  I find this interesting.  Marijuana must be targetting or reacting with something to generate the improvement.  What is the something? I think it is just easier to say that there are outputs without inputs because we really have no way (at least now and i doubt if ever) of accounting for all the possible inputs.  By the way, have we even defined inputs?  I think in some cases it might be hard to differentiate between output and input and I think at some point it is just easier to say it must be a more circular network.  Right now our model seems pretty linear and I would argue that the whole call and response or response without a call models we have been working with are much too simple.  Yet, I am sure further discussion will produce a new, less wrong, model.