Alright. So, the peripheral nervous system, or the PNS, can be divided into two major subsystems. First, over here in green, we have the somatic nervous system. The somatic nervous system controls voluntary movement and it does this by primarily innervating or connecting to skeletal muscles, which are just literally the muscles around your skeleton. So any kind of voluntary movement, like things that you're conscious of.
So, you know, I was writing a word just then. If I was to stir a pot of soup, pick up my dog, kick a ball, all of those things would be controlled by my somatic nervous system. Those are all voluntary movements that I am consciously enacting. Now, over here in purple we have the autonomic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system essentially does the opposite and it controls involuntary movements.
So things that you have no conscious awareness of, things that you have no voluntary control over. This nervous system primarily innervates things like organs, like the heart and lungs, as well as glands and blood vessels. It can tell your blood vessels to constrict or dilate, it can tell glands to release hormones, and it can tell your heart to, you know, pump faster or whatever. So, any kind of function that you have no voluntary control over is going to be controlled by your autonomic nervous system. Now, I always remember this because autonomic sounds a lot like automatic and it basically controls all of the automatic functions in your body.
Now, the somatic nervous system does not get divided any further; it just is what it is, but the autonomic nervous system actually has two subdivisions of its own and we're going to talk about those in our next concept video so I will see you there. Bye bye.