 It's critical that you remember that the autonomic nervous system includes both visceral sensory information and visceral motor information. I think we're more familiar with visceral motor because the branches of the visceral motor part of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches, have distinct anatomical characteristics. And those anatomical characteristics make it easy to identify that half. The visceral sensory aspect doesn't have this amazing, clear, visible in a cadaver anatomical definition. It's more broad, however, it's extremely critical to maintaining homeostasis. So the autonomic nervous system, like the whole gig, is to make sure that your extracellular fluid remains in the correct balance. That's the whole point of this thing. So you have to have some sort of sensory receptors to tell you what is your body temperature, what is your pH of your blood, what's the osmolarity of your blood, what's the pressure of the fluid in your vessels. And those are visceral sensory receptors that are doing that work. Then, so I'm going to draw you a picture. Anna, Anna, draw you a picture. Here's a visceral sensory receptor. And what I'm going to tell you is that, dude, we're going to see these over and over, like for almost every single body system that we're going to look at. We're going to have some sort of visceral sensory receptor that is going to send information about homeostasis to the brain. Where in the brain? Well, of course, a whole pot of information is going to dump on the hypothalamus. In fact, the hypothalamus is considered like mama of all homeostatic things and is in charge of keeping track of things like body temperature, osmolarity of your blood. Even your hunger or fullness, that sensation and whether or not you need to eat something, that's controlled by the hypothalamus. You also have an important group of visceral sensory receptors that target the medulla. The medulla oblongata is this most, what? Inferior portion of the brainstem. And next is the spinal cord. So it's the first piece of brain if you're heading up your spinal cord. And in the medulla oblongata, you have, that's where you control blood pressure. So this, in this example, would be a blood pressure receptor, a baroreceptor, which is actually a mechanoreceptor detecting stretch. And it's going to send the information about that to the medulla. The medulla is going to integrate that information. So this is just two broad, non-specific examples of a place where visceral sensory information is integrated. And now we're going to go into, okay, we just integrated information in the hypothalamus in the medulla, what are we going to do with that information? And usually there is a visceral motor response. So the visceral motor response is what we're going to spend the rest of the time talking about.