afferent nerve fiber

Meredith, I want to ask you, I know a lot of the earlier research that Dustin and yourself did was following ACL injury.

And I know when the ACL is disrupted, right, we get kind of that lack of, is it afferent, afferent? Are you an afferent or afferent person? Afferent.

Afferent, okay.

We'll go with afferent then.

Without that input, we see some changes at a higher level in the central nervous system.

One fascinating feature of the vagus nerve is that approximately 80% of its fibers are afferent.

That's A-F-F-E-R-E-N-T.

That means much of the information carried by the vagus nerve is traveling from the body toward the brain rather than simply carrying commands from the brain downward.

The body is constantly communicating with the brain.

Two different types of investments.

What is, I like to our neurology colleagues, I like the afferent-efferent, so in the neurology system, right? Afferent nerves bringing signals into the brain and efferent nerves moving things out and doing something.

How do we invest in that afferent? What are the ways that we want to actually bring in the data, both in the hospital and connected to our patients in a consumer-oriented model? And then what's the effector arm? And in the middle, sits that signal noise intelligence layer so that we don't further burn out the human clinical teams and actually help better identify those that need direct care and direct human intervention.

You know, what's interesting as you describe that is I can imagine if we kept the number of, let's say, data sources or the amount of data coming in static and we improve the intelligence layer, we could probably have more signal versus the noise.

Like how does our brain perceive that? Right.

Afferent fiber, the afferent signals versus the efferent, which is like, you know, we know afferent can be more dominant in the gut system as a percentage, like 80% versus like how much does the brain, but then we have the whole neuroplasticity piece.

Right.

And then having

Once the central nervous system makes a decision about data, it sends a signal back through to the peripheral nervous system saying, do this thing, which the peripheral nervous system then does.

Both of these systems contain two different types of neurons, afferent and efferent.

Afferent and efferent are biological terms, and they're horribly confusing, and I apologize on behalf of the entire institution of biology for them.

Afferent systems carry things to a central point, and efferent systems carry things away from a central point.

So afferent neurons carry information to the brain and spinal cord for analysis.

In the peripheral nervous system, afferent neurons are called sensory neurons, and they're activated by external stimuli, like the complex and glorious flavor of pizza.

And then they convert those data into a signal for the central nervous system to process.

The central nervous system has afferent neurons, too, and there they bring information into special parts of the brain, like the part of the brain that goes salty.