The Medium of Haptic Perception: A Tensegrity Hypothesis
Michael T Turvey, Sérgio T Fonseca
The body's interconnected network of muscle, connective tissue, and bone may act as the medium for our sense of touch.
For any given animal, the sources of mechanical disturbances inducing tissue deformation define environment from the perspective of the animal's haptic perceptual system. The system's achievements include perceiving the body, attachments to the body, and the surfaces and substances adjacent to the body. Among the perceptual systems, it stands alone in having no defined medium. There is no articulated functional equivalent to air and water, the media that make possible the energy transmissions and diffusions underpinning the other perceptual systems. To identify the haptic system's medium the authors focus on connective tissue and the conjunction of muscular, connective tissue net, and skeletal (MCS) as the body's proper characterization. The challenge is a biophysical formulation of MCS as a continuum that, similar to air and water, is homogeneous and isotropic. The authors hypothesized a multifractal tensegrity (MFT) with the shape and stability of the constituents of each scale, from individual cell to whole body, derivative of continuous tension and discontinuous compression. Each component tensegrity of MFT is an adjustive-receptive unit, and the array of tensions in MFT is information about MCS. The authors extend the MFT hypothesis to body-brain linkages, and to limb perception phenomena attendant to amputation, vibration, anesthesia, neuropathy, and microgravity.
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