Our Internal Universe

Our internal universe, our body, perceives its internal workings of its soma and how it moves, its sense of its immediate surroundings, and what it physically connects to, through its internal web, the haptic perceptual system. Touch any part of it and the whole system responds, and does so much faster than the slow, complicated and cumbersome neurologic system can accommodate. Turvey and Fonseca (2014) propose that the internal communication and adaptive system in the body is mediated primarily through the mesodermal descendants, the muscular, connective tissue, skeletal interconnections—their MCS system—rather than relying solely on the ectodermal descendants via the neuroderm. Their medium for the haptic perceptual system is the biotensegrity model of the MCS, based on the tensegrity icosahedron as defined by Buckminster Fuller (Fuller & Applewhite, 1975). In the biotensegrity model as initially proposed, the tensegrity icosahedron is the model for the framework of all viable structures from viruses to vertebrates, their systems and subsystems (Levin, 1981, 1986). Turvey and Fonseca (2014) conclude that the physical structure of the neurologic network is also based on the tensegrity icosahedron and the two networks are but one, integrated and nested, what they term multifractal tensegrity (MFT). I fully agree with their use of the biotensegrity model to explain the haptic system.IfIhavedisagreement,itiswiththeunderstandingof the technical workings of tensegrities. Deformation of tissue is the key to understanding the haptic system. In Turvey and Fonseca’s (2014) model, information is mechanically generated by a shear in the extracellular matrix (ECM) that is transferred to the cell through its integrin adhesions to the ECM and, in turn, the cell is sheared, generating a chain reaction of shearing through the organism’s mesodermal interconnections.