hi everybody dr mike here in this video i want to introduce to you the nervous system [Music] now every single minute your nervous system picks up millions of bits of information your sensory neurons or sensory organs pick up this information and send it to the brain and spinal cord here this information is integrated or it's made sense of and they decide what they want to do with this information once they've decided they send a signal out to various muscles glands and organs in order to enact some sort of change so what i'm saying is that the nervous system is a complex communication network now the functional subunits or the cells of the nervous system are those of the neurons and it's the neurons that pick up the information and send the information and the supporting cells which are glia and there's multiple types of supporting cells within the nervous system what these particular cells do is they pick up various types of information from the outside and inside environment and the types of information they can pick up is information on touch taste tickle temperature pain pressure sight sound stretch and concentration this information is then sent to either the spinal cord or the brain and spinal cord where it is integrated or made sense of so if for example it's some sort of touch signal or some sort of pain or temperature signal it needs to be made sense of here in what we call the central nervous system the brain and spinal cord once it's made sense off it then decides what it wants to do with it for example if it's something that's too hot maybe you want to move your arm away for example and so it then sends a signal out to various muscles and these muscles can be skeletal muscles these are muscles attached to the bones of our body and we can consciously move it could go to smooth muscles which line our hollow organs like a digestive tract or our urinary system or it could go to our heart muscle for example or maybe it sends the signal to various glands that can release hormones or chemicals to enact some sort of change or maybe some organs for example the pancreas and so what's happening here is that the information that's picked up is sent toward the nervous system or the central nervous system brain and spinal cord and this is called an afferent signal sometimes termed a sensory signal so all sensory signals go in then the signal that goes out is called an efferent signal also known as a motor signal and so all motor signals go out and this is a quick introduction to the nervous system