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After class on Thursday and reading some of the above posts, I realize how infinitely precious having a complete, working system/battery really is. If, as mcrepeau ponders,something as seemingly insignificant as a leaky cable really is a potential source of circuitry failures, it amazes me that so many batteries function without malfunctioning. Thinking about the complexity of the nervous system in such a way is a little bit daunting. In some ways, the more observations that are presented in class and through the thoughts of others on the forum, the more I am amazed that things manage to function constantly at all or conversely, the less confident I feel that that the system will continue to function as it has in the past.

On another note, the conclusion we came to at the end of class on Thursday concerning outputs without input finally makes sense to me. When we imagined this scenario a couple of weeks ago, I was on the side of those who believed that perhaps no input really is an input which would mean that its corresponding output was an output with an input (sorry for that garbled mess...I hope this makes sense!) However, we only considered this situation in respect to leaky regions of the membrane (which would cause the membrane to generate an action potential in the absence of input.) I wonder if there are other possibilities that could point to output without input!