The Original Information Superhighway

Remember the Kurilipa Bridge from chapter 4 on tensegrity? Picture those tensegrity cables now as not just inert supports, but also as a super high speed internet cable which threads information through those supports. Yowza. We’ll talk about a few ways that this happens: It turns out fascia is our richest, and our largest, sensory organ with ten times higher quantity of sensory nerve receptors than the muscles (Van der Wal 2009). In fact, it

is possible that it may be equal or superior to the retina, which has thus far been considered the richest human sensory organ.(Mitchell and Schmidt 1977)

This makes your fascia a system of proprioception- i.e. of knowing where your body is in space, but also of graceful full body orchestration of movement. Pause and take a moment to think about what your life would be like if you couldn’t locate and orient your body in space. You probably wouldn’t be tons of fun at parties. You would more likely spend your life lying on the floor in a small room- but still in misery because the floor wouldn’t feel like there was a “there” there. Super good times. So while we take it for granted, our ability to know where we are in space is pretty crucial to any kind of functional life. Put another way, fascia is “our most important perceptual organ.” (Schleip 2003)

That perception- or input- creates a feedback loop to our cells (fibroblasts and osteoblasts) to adjust their activities in maintaining our tissues according to our movements and the loads we experience. Remember the example I gave in chapter 8 about the casted leg vs. the uncasted leg? One leg got input via loading and

moving the tissue, while the other leg got no input. Every movement of the body generates electric fields (primarily attributed to the piezoelectric effect) and those fields spread through the tissues along your original information superhighway, providing the input that either leads to a normal, healthily maintained leg, or a wasting leg. That’s a pretty important communication feature courtesy of our largest sensory organ!

*This is an excerpt from the PDF Why Fascia Matters. To download it for free in its entirety, you can go to the home page of Emerald City Rolfing.