What does the nervous system do?
The nervous system basically connects the brain to every single nerve inside the body. Some people don't have the pleasure of feeling pain because some of their sensory neurons either don't exist, or they are shot. The Central Nervous System or CNS is the control center that gets all of the information from nerve impulses and then sends them onto the brain. After the CNS, comes the Peripheral Nervous System or PNS. The PNS is connected to the CNS by cranial nerves that are attached to the brain and spinal cord. The PNS branches off into two main branches called the motor division and the sensory division. The motor division branches off into to two more separate nervous systems called the somatic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system. The somatic nervous system is usually in response to external factors. For example, if you wanted to move your hand or foot, the action is going to be controlled by the somatic nervous system. This being said, the somatic nervous system is under a person's conscious control meaning that you have to literally tell your brain that you want to move the particular limb. The autonomic nervous system on the other hand, is not under a person's control. This is a good thing because we couldn't possibly control our internal functions too. We would probably die very quickly from an overload of information. Some of the things that the autonomic nervous system controls are the muscles of the heart and the internal organs. Try grasping the idea of having to tell your heart to beat every second or two seconds. You would be blown away by the impossibility of it all. The sensory division branch is a little simpler to understand. Its basically consists of nerves that control a person's every reflex. If, for example, a person touches a hot object like a burner, the will hopefully have the right nerves working to jerk their hand back.