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 Class this week did help me to understand some of the questions I had as to how an output can exist without an input. But there is a point of clarification that must be made in this analysis of the nervous system: that outputs can occur without inputs, but only if those inputs come from outside the nervous system. When we started talking about how a signal is transmitted from inside the nervous system to outside, I began to wonder how signals are able start in the middle of an axon when it seems like there is such a systematic method of translating these signals. We may have briefly touched on this at the end of class, but I would love to know more about it. And what causes them to stop midway through this process? I know that with Multiple Sclerosis, spasticity is the result of an interruption of the nerve conduction. Are these interruptions in the signal transduction responsible for other diseases? I guess what I am interested at this point in the class is how changes to these signals affect the nervous system as a whole, and if there are certain instances when a change yields no significant result.

I was fascinated by the fact that 99.99999999% of our neurons are interneurons. However, I have a similar question to Emily’s in that I wonder if, and to what degree, these interneurons rely on the sensory and motor neurons, which receive and transmit information from the outside world. It seems to me that communication between neurons would only be possible if there was some knowledge of the environment.