At first, language appears to us to be fixed and rigid. When we write, we seek the correct word to use. Over time, we realize that there are shades of gray: many words will work, but some have will add a particular color that we like.

One day, we realize that both the meaning and the emotional coloration of words are up for grabs. Language itself is fluid (or maybe viscous), and various individuals and tribes are constantly striving to alter both the meaning and connotation of words. Here are three of those skirmishes:

Tensegrity or Tensegrity™

Buckminster Fuller created the word “tensegrity”. Its definition is documented in his 1975 book Synergetics:

700.011 The word tensegrity is an invention: it is a contraction of tensional integrity. Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder.

Words rarely come into existence with a more precise definition than this! All was good, or was it?

Some time later, new-age visionary and writer Carlos Castaneda decided he liked Mr. Fuller’s new word:

Tensegrity is the name given to the modern version of the magical passes: positions and movements of body and breath that were dreamt and stalked by men and women seers who lived in Mexico in ancient times [...] The word Tensegrity is borrowed from an architect, engineer, scientist and dreamer whom Carlos Castaneda admired: R. Buckminster Fuller [...]

I do not know if Castaneda got Fuller’s permission to use the word for this very different purpose. In the tapestry of language, “borrowed” is a euphemism; the odds of the word ever being returned are remote. In the mid-1990s, Cleargreen, Incorporated, publisher of Castaneda’s videos, received a trademark on the word for the purpose of educational videos about patterns of physical movement.

I have never seen Castaneda’s dances. I’m certain they’re a viable body/mind discipline. Few may appreciate the irony of the two meanings: Castaneda’s dances are probably quite effective at developing the springiness/resiliency of our musculoskeletal system, which is a tensegrity. Was Castaneda early in making this brilliant insight, or did he latch onto Fuller’s word because it sounded sexy?

What impact did this “borrowing” have on Fuller’s precise definition? It’s difficult to know. Earlier this the year, I asked a German publisher of a physics textbook why he hadn’t included the word in his updated edition; I included technical explanations of Fuller’s tensegrity. He replied:

I had never heard about this! It seems interesting, though the word ‘tensegrity’ is very unserious, and is typical for terms used by crackpots.

I appreciated the publisher’s straightforward answer. Often, when we have a negative connotation for a word has, we’re unwilling to share it. The word will never be returned to a single definition; the best that can be done now is to note the two meanings. Also, the Wikipedia notes the ambiguity.

Science

This summer, I saw the movie “The Living Matrix: A Film on the New Science of Healing”

This movie claims to deliver a “viable scientific theory” linking a quantum physics “field” to our health and healing. As I note in my review and follow-up, no scientific theory linking these two things is ever stated. None of the steps of the scientific method are followed.

“The Living Matrix” delivers a long series of speculations that our health and healing is determined by quantum physics “field”. Why are those speculations called science? Viewers unfamiliar with the rigor of research and documentation required to call something science may be impressed with the claim. On the other hand, those who understand the scientific method will be mystified when they notice that the science doesn’t exist.

In this discussion on facebook I asked The Living Matrix producer Harry Massey to resolve this disconnect between what the movie claims and what it delivers. I fondly hope that will happen in the next few days.

Spatial Medicine

Anatomy expert Tom Myers, author of the book Anatomy Trains, wrote a fabulous essay “Spatial Medicine” several years ago. This essay is not science; Myers is suggesting a powerful way to think about body/mind disciplines, healing, and our health:

In Spatial Medicine, nothing is added but information; nothing is taken away but strain. We do not mean to imply that Material Medicine – nutrition or drugs – have no effect on structure – sometimes they very much can and do. And the practice of Temporal Medicine – e.g. psychotherapy – can sometimes affect posture, as when a mental or emotional burden is relieved, and the body straightens in response.

Spatial Medicine is working from a different premise from either of the other two: get the spatial order of the elements right, and you will contribute to health. Align the bones, free the glued fabric, balance muscle tonus – and watch the changes to chemical and mental health, as well as seeing the structure and movement itself improve. All the therapists working in the fields above can attest to stacks of anecdotal evidence for the kinds of mental, spiritual, and physiological changes that proceed from interventions to the structure and movement of the client / patient.

Spatial Medicine is a way to notice both the limitations and the possibility of language. It’s a fabulous name and a fabulous essay.

Taking the architectural concept of tenesegrity as a starting point, Chanel Research made a major discovery: the key role of a critical protein in the aging process — Tensin. To stimulate the production of Tensin, Chanel developed an exclusive ingredient, Elemi PFA, to naturally lift the skin from within.

If you click on “The Science” link on that flash site, you’ll find the question: What if the skin were a structure?

Since the skin is a structure, that’s an excellent question to ask! Few adults ever spend any time thinking about structure, let alone biological structures. Understanding tensegrity requires that we reexamine our fundamental assumptions about structure. Unfortunately, things go downhill from there. Clicking on that question reveals the following:

1940: Structure and Tensegrity
Tensegrity, derived from “tension” and “integrity”, is a basic architectural concept. So what is it? The integrity and resilience of any structure results from the balanced distribution of the forces of tension and compression within itself.

Tensegrity models were invented in the 1940s by the artist Kenneth Snelson while studying under Buckminster Fuller. He called them floating compression structures: the compression elements of a structure do not touch but instead have a floating relationship with each other. If that doesn’t make sense, I recommend looking at the images on Snelson’s website.

Tensegrity is hardly a basic architectural concept: virtually none of our buildings are built this way. In virtually all buildings, the compression elements—the beams—touch each other, and the load of the building is carried compressionally though those beams. Mankind rarely uses tensegrity to create structure; nature uses it everywhere. These manmade structures do not have the balanced distribution of the forces of tension and compression. Chanel’s statement misses the fundamental and astonishing point that those studying Snelson’s invention know: tensegrity is really different.

Continuing from the Chanel website:

2000: Harvard University and Tensegrity
A leading Harvard professor applied this concept to biology.
What did he say? That all forms of life require an optimal structure, in which tension is efficiently distributed, to guarantee an optimal biological activity.

Ingber’s specialty is cellular biology. He has papers going back to at least the early 1990s on the use of tensegrity to create structure within our individual cells. Dr. Stephen Levin, the pioneer for the application of tensegrity to our musculoskeletal structure, has papers on that topic back to the early 1980s. The chapter on Tensegrity from Buckminster Fuller’s 1970s book “Synergetics” shows multiple applications of tensegrity to biological structure. Ingber applied the concept to individual cells, but he wasn’t the first to think about applying tensegrity to living structure.

What has Ingber said about biological tensegrity? Besides his research papers, he wrote this excellent article for the January 1998 issue of Scientific American Magazine. Nowhere in that article does Ingber say anything about all forms of life needing an optimal structure. I also can’t imagine the accomplished cellular biologist speculating about “all [possible] forms of life”.

The third quote from the Chanel website:

For the first time, CHANEL Research applied the principle of tensegrity to a range of lifting and firming skincare products. What is the link between tensegrity and firmness? Facial firmness is dependent on the structure and the shape of the cells making up the face. With age, cells lose volume, the skin slackens, and fascial contours lose their definition. Tensegrity needs to be restored: CHANEL introduces the CELLULAR LIFTING EFFECT.

This statement is questionable. Our bodies are a tensegrity from very early in our embryonic development to the day we die. We don’t need our body’s tensegrity “to be restored”, because it never went away in the first place. Tensin is a component of the intercellular structure of our bodies, but stimulating our body’s production of Tensin does not “restore the tensegrity” in our skin.

The Fallacy of Increased Tension

Does increasing the tension of of the tensegrity in our skin increase its resiliency? Is artificially stimulating our superficial Tensin production better than, say, using Botox? Maybe. My point is that I see absolutely no scientific research showing that stimulating Tensin production is superior to any other treatments for giving us supple and wrinkle-free skin. Ingber is an expert in the function of tensegrity within cells, but I have seen no research that the biologist has done on the function of our intercellular structures. If any scientific research exists on that topic, Chanel should provide a reference!

The most fascinating discussion I have found about tension in our biological structures comes from anatomy expert Thomas Myers. Myers founded KMI, a school to learn structural integration. He has also created a tensegrity-oriented mapping of the long lines of tension in our musculoskeletal system. His text “Anatomy Trains” describes these long lines of tension. The 2nd edition of this book was published in 2009; a free 20-page summary of the first edition is available here.

Does increasing the tension of our musculoskeletal tensegrity increase its resiliency? Higher tension actually decreases our body’s ability to deal with day-to-day wear and tear. Body/mind disciplines like Yoga and Pilates serve to lower the overall tension in our bodies. Myers talks about this in a paper called “Spatial Medicine“:

In Spatial Medicine, nothing is added but information; nothing is taken away but strain. [...] Spatial Medicine is working from a different premise from [chemical or mental treatments]: get the spatial order of the elements right, and you will contribute to health. Align the bones, free the glued fabric, balance muscle tonus – and watch the changes to chemical and mental health, as well as seeing the structure and movement itself improve. All the therapists working in the fields above can attest to stacks of anecdotal evidence for the kinds of mental, spiritual, and physiological changes that proceed from interventions to the structure and movement of the client / patient.

The second edition of Anatomy Trains speculates about the relationship between the large and the small. An out-of-balance musculoskeletal tensegrity can create excessive tension in our smallest structures. If you shift your head forwards of the rest of your body, you can feel a slight tightening of the skin on your face. A large fraction of our society spends all day with our heads slightly forward of the rest of our bodies. Consider: simply aligning our bodies could reduce the formation of crow’s feet and other wrinkles on our faces with no cosmetics—and no cost—whatsoever.

I do want to emphasize that Myers is speculating and not doing science. I know of no scientific studies linking the regular practice of body/mind disciplines to less wrinkles on our bodies. Funding for such research is more difficult than funding for cosmetic products, because no company holds intellectual property that can benefit from the research.

I am grateful that Chanel talks about tensegrity and invites people to think about structure. I wish that they would provide references to the science rather than just talk about the science. Also, any claims that their new products are rooted in “the science of tensegrity” seem to be a bit of a stretch.

One particular claim from the movie came from Dietmar Cimbal, DVM, who the filmmakers label as a “biophysics researcher”. Dr. Cimbal talks about direction shifts of flocks of birds:

“Every one of us has watched a flock of birds in flight and how it changes direction. Instantly, all birds in the flock change direction. So, it seems as if a superior bird-brain controls all the birds simultaneously. That only works with the help of those fields, since the fields are able to transfer, with no information loss, and, above all, instantaneously with no time delay.”

A skeptic would have several questions at this point: Why does Dr. Cimbal presume the shifts are instantaneous? What observations did he make of flocks, and what instruments did he use to measure them? Where did he publish his results? If he was using someone else’s research, where is that research?

Shifts of Flocks Are Not Instantaneous

Using a combination of high-speed photography and statistical methods, scientists have determined that direction shifts in flocks are not instantaneous. The research is described in this article from Audubon Magzine; an abstract of a formal paper on this research is available here. Here’s my favorite segment of the Audubon article:

“Like drivers on a freeway, starlings don’t appear to mind having neighbors nearby on their sides—or above and below, for that matter—as long as they have open space ahead. That makes sense, since the presence of a clear path in the direction of travel minimizes the likelihood of collisions should the birds need to shift their course abruptly, as is likely when a falcon attacks. But what’s really nifty about this spatial asymmetry is that the researchers have been able to use it to calculate the number of neighbors to which each starling pays close attention—a quantified elaboration of Potts’s chorus line idea. By looking at correlations between the movements of neighboring starlings, they can show that each bird always pays attention to the same number of neighbors, whether they’re closer or farther away. How many neighbors is that? Six or seven, says Cavagna, who points out that starlings in flocks can almost always see many more nearby birds—but the number may be closely tied to birds’ cognitive ability.”

UK resident Mr. Dylan Winter has published a remarkable video of starling flocks near Oxford, England. I recommend watching the video in high quality: click the screen once to start the video playing, then click on the HQ button below the video.

Dr. Cimbal’s claim that birds are communicating instantaneously through some sort of flock-encompassing “field” has been superseded by a far simpler scientific explanation. Each bird is observing the motion of six or seven other birds, and that is sufficient to allow for the coordinated and fluid motion of the flock as a whole. Further, Cimbal’s “instantaneous” claim seems to have been based on pure speculation and not scientific research. It’s part of the bad science in The Living Matrix.

Demonstrating that claims are backed up with scientific research is simple; I showed how earlier in this section. There is no excuse for a science documentary failing to provide links back to real science.

Certain responsibilities come with the creation of a science documentary. How did the filmmakers of The Living Matrix evaluate what information to include in their film? What due diligence did they perform on the claims made by their “experts”? As far as I can tell, little to no fact-checking was done. It took me about five minutes of searching on google to find the Audubon article and the research paper behind it.

Will they now publish an errata page on their website?

“Viscoelastic” is a term used by physicists to describe materials that behave in two different ways: a fluid (viscous) and a solid (elastic). Viscous materials are fluids like water, motor oil, or honey. Viscous substances have a great capacity to absorb energy. Amusement parks use water to safely slow down rides after a drop. This video shows a 131-foot drop on “Pilgrim’s Plunge” a new water ride at Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana. Will Koch is the president of Holiday World; he gets to ride with The Big Guy.

To physicists, “elastic” means rigid. Billiard balls or ball bearings are classic examples of elastic objects. Elastic substances efficiently transfer energy in a collision; they obey Newton’s third law. This great little video shows a bunch of different elastic collisions with a toy called Newton’s Cradle:

Viscoelastic substances behave both ways. If you interact with them quickly, they behave like a solid; if you interact with them gently, they behave like a fluid. This Spanish video shows a television audience playing with a pool of corn starch and water. Note: that’s a concrete mixer in the background; it takes a lot of corn starch!

Here’s a Mythbusters segment showing the same thing.

The question for today’s article: is our musculoskeletal structure fluid (viscous), solid (elastic), or both (viscoelastic)?

More Examples

As noted earlier, liquid water is primarily fluid, but can be quite rigid if you hit it the wrong way: a belly flop! Audrey Tautou in “Amélie” collects smooth flat stones; this clip shows how she uses them:

One example you will be able to do at your home or at a bed store: if you gently push on a Tempurpedic or other “memory foam” mattress, you hand will sink into the structure (fluid!). If you slap the surface of a Tempurpedic mattress, you will leave no impression (solid!). If you do this in a store, please tell the bed salesman what you’re doing before you slap the mattress. You won’t hurt the mattress, but you may startle the salesman.

The Human Body

Are we visco? Are we elastic? We’re both: we’re viscoelastic!

If you have a 5-year-old who has been awake for too many hours to watch Fourth of July fireworks, he will be very fluid-like when you carry him home.

On the flip side, a racer poised in the starting blocks of the Olympic finals of the 100 Meter dash will be very rigid. He’s ready to push his body with as much force as is humanly possible.

This video shows a T’ai Chi “push hands” practice. The exercise starts with both students being very fluid and suddenly becoming very rigid. You’re welcome to watch the whole video, but you’ll get the point if you watch the first minute or so.

Our body’s tensegrity structure makes all this possible: when the lines of tension are relatively relaxed, the structure is fluid; when the tension is increased, the structure becomes rigid. Tensegrity gives us not only a vast repertoire of movement but the means to vary the fluidity of each of those movements. Judson Laipply demonstrates this in his famous “Evolution of Dance” video:

The goal is not to be as fluid as possible all the time; the goal is to have the appropriate amount of fluidity/rigidity for whatever you’re doing.

Body/Mind Work

When we’re startled by a loud noise, we instantly crank up our structural tensions in a “fight or flight” reflex. Body/mind classes train us to do the opposite: lowering the tensions to restore a sense of flow and fluidity to the body. A goal of all body/mind disciplines is to be able to rapidly identify and eliminate superfluous stresses in our body at any point during the day.

Simply realizing that we are viscoelastic — that our bodies can be fluid or rigid moment by moment — can instantly alter how we hold and move our bodies.

I appreciate scientists, but they often pick words too complicated for their own good. A concept like “viscoelastic” is darn useful for each of us to pronounce, contemplate, and explore.

VIS – co – e – LAS – tic

While the experts are speaking, the “voice” of TLM is really the director and the editor: what questions are asked and what edited parts of the experts’ responses are used. TLM experts criticize a reductionist approach to understanding the world, but this film itself is fundamentally reductionist: pulling small parts of separate conversations and reassembling them outside of their original context. DVDs provide a means to archive massive amounts of low-resolution video; I would really like to have access to the original interview footage.

Preface: How Skeptics Think

There are a variety of scientific claims made in the film. These claims may be backed up with research, but no references to published papers are provided (other than listing the books that the various experts have published). I attempt to stay current on a broad spectrum of scientific topics; when I see some new claim with no references, I tend to dismiss it. The website would be an ideal place for links to the scientific research, but the producers haven’t created this reference.

Why would a skeptic care? Because the documentary repeatedly claimed it was discussing was scientific theories. There are certain rules that one must follow for that claim to be legitimate. If someone is not going through this process—or reporting on a group of scientists who did—what they are doing is speculating or making conjectures. It’s not that one is good and the other is bad, but there is mischief in failing to distinguish between the two.

This kind of movie is not the best way to learn science. Watching tightly-cut commentary from a variety of experts overloads rational thought; viewing nonstop causes more of an emotional response rather than a rational one. Frequently pausing the movie and researching the science (or lack of science) behind the claims causes the movie to play very differently.

Isaac Newton and Whole Systems

TLM expert Lynne McTaggart, author of “The Field”, comments that the work of Newton and Descartes first “ripped us out of the fabric of our universe” and “created a clockwork model where mind is separate from body and that we are separate from each other.” I’ve heard similar commentary from a variety of new-age thinkers, but they rarely if ever note that Chaos Theory in the 1980s irrevocably smashed Newton’s Clockwork Universe.

TLM expert Bruce Lipton, PhD, says, “[…] that’s the newtonian perspective that says to focus on the matter; don’t pay attention to the rest of the stuff.” The astronomical three body problem—studied extensively by Newton—is the quintessence of independence and interdependence of objects. There is no cause or effect; it’s about the momentum and the gravitational fields of the three items interacting with each other.

A restricted case of the three body problem easily demonstrates chaotic movement. As Professor Steven Strogatz notes in his 2003 book “Sync”, even our own solar system’s orbital mechanics are chaotic: in the time frame of about five million years, the location of the planets becomes unpredictable. Sir James Lighthill’s “The recently recognized failure or predictability in Newtonian mechanics” (1986) summarizes chaos theory’s predictability limits in a short but wonderfully-written paper. This document is not freely available online, but it’s worth a trip to a University library to pick up a copy.

Physician Stephen Levin, who is not in this movie, lectures that the physical structures of the human body are non-Newtonian. In a variety of papers and lectures, he demonstrates that a “levers and hinges” model is fundamentally insufficient to describe the posture and movement of the human body. Thomas Myers (also not in this movie) has created a mapping of lines of musculoskeletal tension in his groundbreaking text “Anatomy Trains” (a 20-page summary is available free from his website). Professor Donald Ingber (also not in the movie) studies the use of these tensegrity structures at a cellular level; his paper “The Architecture of Life” appeared in the January 1998 edition of Scientific American Magazine.

Levin, Myers, and Ingber each credit visionary Buckminster Fuller for his whole-system means of thinking about natural structures. Their biological models are based on tensegrity, a kind of structure that was invented in the 1940s by Kenneth Snelson. Fuller’s comments on Snelson’s invention are particularly enlightening:

“724.34 The tensegrity system is synergetic—a behavior of the whole unpredicted by the behavior of the parts. Old stone-age columns and lintels are energetic and only interact locally with whole buildings. The whole tensegrity-icosahedron system, when loaded oppositely at two diametric points, contracts symmetrically, and because it contracts symmetrically, its parts get symmetrically closer to one another; therefore, gravity increases as of the second power, and the whole system gets uniformly stronger. This is the way atoms behave.”

Fuller’s definition of synergetics is also quite instructive:

“200.06 Synergetics shows how we may measure our experiences geometrically and topologically and how we may employ geometry and topology to coordinate all information regarding our experiences, both metaphysical and physical. Information can be either conceptually metaphysical or quantitatively special case physical experiencing, or it can be both.”

TLM expert Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, notes: “[The current biological model] tries to treat the organism as a machine that works simply in terms of physics and chemistry.” However, the “machine” of our musculoskeletal structure described by Levin, Myers, and Ingber is unlike any manmade mechanism. It’s loosely coupled and contains no levers, gears, or any of the six simple machines. Just like our solar system, Newton’s “clockwork” model has been irrevocably smashed for the physics of our musculoskeletal and cellular structures.

Science does indeed embrace a whole-system perspective. Buckminster Fuller’s words are the antithesis of reductionist thinking. Every part matters, and the interactions between the parts are just as important as the parts themselves. Levin, Myers, and Ingber have brilliantly applied Fuller’s and Snelson’s work to living structure. Their work is inspiring and is a fount of great thinking for anyone who takes the time to contemplate their writings.

Chaos Theory

Chaos theory was pioneered the 1960s by late MIT meteorology professor Edward Lorenz. Fellow MIT professor Kerry Emanuel commented on his lifetime accomplishment:

“By showing that certain deterministic systems have formal predictability limits, Ed put the last nail in the coffin of the Cartesian universe and fomented what some have called the third scientific revolution of the 20th century, following on the heels of relativity and quantum physics.”

TLM criticizes Newton’s “clockwork universe”, but fails to recognize that science has indeed moved on from that eighteenth century model. Claiming that science still uses Newton’s clockwork models to understand the human body is an outdated straw man argument. It’s a disservice to science—and to viewers of this film—to perpetuate this disinformation. Science encourages whole-system thinking; coordination and synchronization of loosely-coupled structure is a fundamental principle of chaos theory.

Quantum Physics

McTaggart speaks briefly about the quantum physics zero point field, where virtual particles are created, exist for a short amount of time and are then annihilated. She talks about the virtual particles created:

“[…] that little individual exchange isn’t much energy. It’s about half a watt’s worth. But when you multiply all of the subatomic particles doing this energy exchange across all things in all the universe, you come up with this unfathomable amount of energy all happening out there in empty space. Like some supercharged backdrop.”

This was one of those points that raised my eyebrows. Do physicists really view bits of the quantum vacuum as tiny little batteries (or capacitors) that one could somehow “supercharge” something en masse? Have any physicists published theories about this? I found none online. If there are no theories, what’s the point? For me, the whole discussion of the Zero Point Field was basically a distraction.

The Placebo Effect

TLM expert Bruce Lipton, PhD, notes,

“Science has recognized that at least one third of all healings—including drugs, and surgery, and other allopathic interventions—one third of all healings has nothing to do with the process but has to do with the placebo effect.”

More discussion follows. At a later point in the documentary, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, PhD, describes a story where an irregularity on his kidney was apparently healed by a remote healer thousands of miles away. I wondered if Mitchell had considered the possibility that his healings may have instead been accomplished with the placebo effect.

The possibility that placebo may be responsible for any of the healings was never discussed in the movie.

Theories

TLM expert professor Fritz-Albert Popp, PhD, studies light emissions from living tissues. The narrator comments on his work: “Professor Popp theorizes that these bio-photon emissions may be controlling our body’s metabolism.” What was his theory? How has it been tested? What were the results? Where were they published? I followed from the movie website’s link to Popp’s site, but found no papers about bio-photon emissions controlling metabolism.

TLM expert Dietmar Cimbal, DVM speculates that there is seemingly an external force that is causing the “instantaneous” changes in direction of a flock of birds or a school of fish. This science article from the New York Times offers a simpler explanation. This article from the March 2009 edition of Audubon Magazine provides more information about how individual birds can coordinate direction shifts. The phenomenon of synchronizing behavior of groups of animals is discussed extensively in Strogatz’s book “Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life”, one of our leading scientists on chaos theory. Strogatz has also published papers about the synchronization of the pacemaking nerves in the heart.

TLM expert Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, comments on Morphogenetic fields : “This field is now a crucial concept in developmental biology. You can’t really understand how organisms develop without it.” The narrator describes the issue: how do the cells in the developing embryo know how they should specialize—what kind of cell each of them should become? This 2006 paper suggests a far simpler mechanism: the mechanical structure and strains of the developing embryo is used to indicate to the cells how to specialize. I am not implying that this theory is correct, but there are indeed alternative explanations to Sheldrake’s fields.

TLM expert Lynne McTaggart comments, “Many scientists who are on the frontier theorize and have demonstrated that we’re an information system, and it’s not entirely localized in our body. That we’re accessing information from The Field all the time.” What scientists? What theories? How did they test their theories, and where did they publish their results? If the scientists weren’t doing all these things, then they weren’t actually scientifically theorizing.

The movie concludes with TLM expert Peter Fraser saying, “[…] but I think now we have a viable scientific theory for how the body stores and accesses information. So we do have a medical revolution on our hands.” Again: What is the theory? Where has it been published? What does it predict? How have those predictions been tested, and what were the results? If there is a viable scientific theory, then those questions would have already been answered.

If the moviemakers want to discuss scientific theories in The Living Matrix, they need to provide references to those theories! This is simple to do: you provide references to peer-reviewed papers on the specific research. It is the responsibility of the filmmakers to clearly distinguish between scientific theories and pseudoscientific speculation. This could be done on the film’s website, but there’s currently no information about which theories are actually scientific. Calling something a “viable scientific theory” that has never gone through the rigors of the scientific method is a major disservice to the public.

The Good Stuff

I’m inspired by all the healing stories in this movie. Lynne McTaggart’s recommendation to believe in whatever kind of health/healing modality you are using is excellent advice. It’s possible to believe in something without completely understanding how it works. This is probably the case with almost any kind of healing: Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, PhD, notes that we still do not completely understand how healing works for things like small cuts or wounds.

Unfortunately, there were no details about the science of what we do know—stuff that James Oschman, PhD, is very familiar with. His text “Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis” is a no-nonsense text about the mechanics of healing. Readers will learn about a variety of tools used by the body to see what’s injured and heal it: magnetic fields, electrical potentials of microvolts in the body, etc.

Summary

The central theme of the movie is the existence of a quantum “field” that provides a variety of functions: information storage, cosmic connection, energy, embryonic development, regulation of metabolic functions, etc. The “field” spans the cosmos and connects us with everything. While most of the experts speak with certainty of the existence of this “field”—claiming that it is a “viable scientific theory”—no scientific theory is ever provided. The razzle dazzle chain of conjectures breaks down when you pause the DVD, repeatedly, and investigate the various claims being made.

Incorrect stereotypes of Newtonian physics are perpetuated, and chaos theory is ignored. Almost a century of whole-system engineering and its great spokesman, Buckmister Fuller, are never ever mentioned.

Individuals seeking a source that would show the science behind alternative health/healing technologies will be disappointed by this film. If anyone is seeking this, I recommend they purchase Oschman’s book “Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis” as a starting point.

BRIDGING MARS from Zoran Novacki on Vimeo.

Tensegrity masts are also used for deploying a variety of instrumentation and solar panels on orbiting satellites. The tensile network is bearing the weight of the structure; by increasing the tension, the mast deploys. It’s a remarkably material-efficient way to “reach out” with structure. Tensegrity masts can even teach us how to reach out more effectively with our arms and legs.

Reaching Out from our Bodies

Our arms can be thought of as tensegrity masts: bridges to reach out from our body to the world. Like the Mars Bridge, our masts are deployed and supported with lines of tension. The Deep Front and Deep Back Arm Lines are used to effortlessly engage our arm-masts. These lines are fully described in Thomas Myers’s book Anatomy Trains. Myers provides a 20-page summary of the book here.

Are all the muscles tensioned in our arm? No. Most of the superficial muscles are relaxed; relaxing them cues the deep muscles to engage.

There’s one hidden detail about the Mars Bridge: before deployment starts, its base is connected to the ground. This allows the “reaching” to work smoothly and gracefully — with no danger of the bridge toppling into the ravine. To reach and carry loads gracefully, the mast is simultaneously pulling inwards as it reaches outwards.

For our arms to work this way, the shoulder is engaged or pulled back over the shoulder girdle. Again, this pulling happens with deep muscles; it’s actually a very relaxed engagement. Body/mind workers have a variety of terms for this movement: integrated shoulder, scapular stability, etc. Body/mind master instructor Eric Franklin has a wonderful book on this topic: Relax Your Back: Liberate Your Shoulders.

Using your arm like a tensegrity mast allows it to work with far less stress. Powerfully connecting your shoulder to the lines of tension in your torso will allow you use more muscles to support the weight of your arm. This one simple movement may dramatically lessen upper back stress and pain. If you practice it, you may even notice that your arms can float upwards with very little effort. I practice this sometimes when stopped at a traffic light.

Thanks to Landolf at the Tensegrity Structures blog for finding the wonderful “Bridging Mars” video.

Transmission Lines

Power Transmission Lines are used to distribute electrical power from generation facilities to homes and businesses. They provide a redundant network for power distribution; everyone should get reliable power even if parts of the transmission line network are temporarily shut down.

In the US, overhead transmission lines come in sets of three, and they usually deliver three phase power. The three power cables are held at uniform tension, and the distance between the three cables is precisely maintained throughout the entire transmission network.

Wind can cause the individual cables to vibrate; those vibrations can wear the cables out much faster. Cables moving individually could also create electrical noise and lower the quality of power in the grid.

Engineers use Stockbridge dampers to control mechanical vibrations on each segment of the cable. In this picture, there are a total of eight stockbridge dampers visible. These dampers are “tuned” to optimally absorb the particular kinds of wind-induced vibrations that the cables encounter.

These dampers are a classic loosely-coupled design; it’s also a bit counterintuitive that such a small widget could effectively control the vibrations on a long length of cable, but they do the job. These dampers are ubiquitous on transmission lines, but they were invisible to me until I started researching damping systems. Next time you’re near a transmission line, look for the Stockbridge dampers. And watch how the transmission lines move so … gracefully.

Door Closers

Many doors at homes and most at businesses have some sort of auto-closing mechanism. A well-tuned door-closer will positively but silently close the door. A door-closer has two main parts: a spring to close the door, and a damper to prevent the door from slamming shut. Engineers would call a door-closer a classic “mass-spring-damper”. Electrical engineers may note circuits that function in a similar fashion; electrical vibrations are modeled similarly to mechanical ones.

Everyone is familiar with springs, but many of us have never played with a damper. Dampers usually work by having a piston move through a cylinder of fluid — the “damp” part of a damper. When a diver enters a pool of water, the water rapidly damps — or slows down — the movement. If you put a tuning fork into a glass of water, the tuning fork will rapidly stop moving. In all cases, the fluid is absorbing the motion from the thing being damped.

What happens to the energy of the motion? In all of the examples above, the damped motion gets converted into heat. The rise in temperature depends on how much motion was damped and the size of the reservoir of fluid. A swimming pool would only get a tiny bit warmer from hundreds of divers, but door-closer could heat rapidly if a door were continually opened and closed for a couple of minutes. Heavy-duty dampers are designed to deal with more open/close cycles will be able to work correctly over many more open-close cycles per hour than a light-duty damper. If you see signs that fluid has leaked from a damper, that’s a sign that it needs to be maintained and/or upgraded to a more robust unit.

Almost all door closers have simple controls to adjust how they close. They have separate adjustments for the spring constant and for the damping factor. If a door isn’t closing the way you like, it’s usually very easy to adjust.

Pianos

Pianos were created in the early 1700s. At the time, the predominant keyboard instrument was the harpsichord. Pianos rapidly eclipsed the harpsichord in popularity and gained widespread acceptance as a solo, ensemble, and accompanying instrument. Pianos were originally named a pianoforte for their ability to play both softly and loudly; the name was eventually shortened to its current (and nondescript) name.

The first great innovation of the piano was a mechanism where the keys could be struck that allowed for both a louder and softer instrument than earlier keyboard instruments. Each key’s action is designed to strike the appropriate strings then rapidly move away to allow the strings to vibrate freely. Each hammer is wrapped with felt, a damping material, to give a clear and clean sound. The action is pressure-sensitive; pressing a key firmly will strike the string more forcefully than pressing a key gently.

Keyboard instruments have each of the strings tensioned (or tuned) to vibrate at a particular frequency. How long is a particular string allowed to vibrate? It depends on the particular instrument. Hammered dulcimers allow the strings to continue to vibrate until they damp on their own—over a dozen seconds for most the strings. Many of a dulcimer’s strings could be vibrating at the same time. These dissonances may sound strange and disagreeable to listeners only familiar with “modern” string instruments.

Both a harpsichord and a piano will damp a string when its key is released. The piano adds a sustain pedal which temporarily overrides the damping mechanisms of the individual strings. Pianists can strike over a dozen keys, sustaining a full and broad chord, and stop all the vibrations at once. A second pedal, the soft pedal, shifts the piano’s mechanism to strike only 2 of the 3 strings for each key and instantly decreasing the volume of the piano. The sustain and soft pedal mechanisms are the second great innovation of the pianoforte.

From these examples…

Door closers show that tensioning and damping are complementary and distinct components of movement. Adjusting the tension is different from adjusting the damping (and vice versa).

Stockbridge dampers show that a little bit of damping can go a long way. Through body/mind exercise, a small bit of development in our damping mechanisms can dramatically enhance our gracefulness.

The pianoforte shows that more damping is not necessarily better. Sometimes we need a lot of control and sometimes we should let everything run free. Graceful movement is about our ability to adapt our control/damping mechanism to be in concert with what we want in the moment.

What other examples of graceful movement do you see? What can you take from those examples and apply to your posture and movement?

Part 1: Structure

1. The best way to describe the relationship between the bones is a floating relationship.

2. The resiliency of our body is something we can consciously and deliberately alter over time.

3. The most important strength is the strength of the system as a whole.

4. Our superficial and deep muscles play fundamentally different roles.

Part 2: Body/Mind

5a. Stacking-based imagery is pervasive in our culture; such imagery literally holds us down.

5b. By carefully observing ourselves and nature, it is possible to realize a different metaphor: floating compression.

6. There is a brilliance to our bodies that is largely unexplored.

7. Body/mind disciplines are a systemic means of exploring the world of floating compression that somehow, strangely, we have forgotten.

8. A pattern of movement that strategically alters the tension in our bodies is a body/mind discipline.

(Example of #5a: a skeleton is used to represent our musculoskeletal structure, but lacks any tensile elements.)

Brief Discussion

#2: We know we can train at the gym for strength or aerobic capacity; we can also train for springiness. All three kinds of training are complementary. In particular, springiness training will give you resiliency to injury, less pain, and facilitate recovery from all your training. Many kinds of “springiness training” can be done anywhere.

#4: Much exercise emphasizes the superficial layers; body/mind generally uses all layers. In general, more awareness of your body allows you to engage deeper layers all the time and to relax the superficials.

#5a: Stacking-based imagery is everywhere in our society! It’s so pervasive that we don’t even see it: our toys, our vehicles, our buildings. It’s everywhere in our vocabulary: seeing if an idea stacks up, nailing a proposal, solidifying an idea.

When we know a truth, we know it in our bones. In the doctor’s office, the model of our structure is the bones. There are none of the soft tissues — muscles, tendons, and ligaments — in those doctor’s models. Why don’t we ever know it in our ligaments?

#5b: Floating Bones is a linguistic bit of floating-based imagery. Seeing floating compression models adds a dimension to the understanding. Touching and playing with them adds another. Conversing with the model adds another layer of richness to the floating models. That’s why I recommend getting a model.

We are always using some sort of imagery to control our bodies; that imagery is either compression-based or floating-based.

#6: Part of the brilliance of our design is our adaptability. Adaptability is our greatest strength, but it’s also our greatest weakness. We equate our adaptations to the truth—especially for adaptations that happened a long time ago or that we practice regularly.

#7 I use the word strangely because we all knew how to move with springiness and resiliency when we were little children.

#8 The tensions that hold our misalignments in place are invisible to us. If we knew that the tensions were there, we’d probably release them on our own. This speaks to the value of going to classes or working one-on-one with body/mind professionals.

You may also want to view a different cut on this from the presentation that I gave at Ignite Phoenix. To see that presentation, click on that link, then click on “Floating Bones” in the right column.

These are well-crafted; I keep finding new things when I look over the list. If you find new things, please post comments. If you twitter, please tell us about them in a #floatdujour.

In the summers of 1947 and 1948, Fuller taught at Black Mountain College, and spoke constantly of “tensional integrity”. Universe seems to rely on continuous tension to embrace islanded compression elements, he mused; we must find a way to model this structural principle. Much to his delight, a student and later well-known sculptor, Kenneth Snelson, provided the answer. He presented his discovery to Fuller: a small structure consisting of three separated struts held rigidly in place with a few strings.

You can see an image of Snelson’s early sculptures here. For more images from this remarkable sculptor, look at his website.

Most of us haven’t had an opportunity to play with a tensegrity; having one in hand helps tremendously to understand them. Fortunately, you can buy one of these at your local toy store or from Amazon.com: it’s called a Skwish Toy. Get a Skwish! Body/mind workers: get several of these toys; figure out ways to use them in your classes. Better yet, get one of the medical-grade models from Tom Flemons.

With a tensegrity in hand, you can see two very important principles:

You’ll see that the structure is smooshable when you push it in any direction. Buckminster Fuller calls this omnitensional integrity. Fuller notes, “Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder.”

If you smoosh the structure very slowly, you will notice that it pushes back against the smoosh very little at first. The push-back will increase as you deform the structure more. A balanced tensegrity is very fluid-like; when it gets out of balance, it starts to become rigid. The structure behaves in a non-Hookean manner—a fancy way of saying nonlinear. As Dr. Levin notes on his website, this nonlinear behavior is crucial to moving our structures with energy efficiency.

Who ever thought that a child’s toy could show you something so profound?

“Modularity is the property of a system that has been decomposed into a set of cohesive and loosely coupled modules.”

Today, Booch’s ideas of loosely coupled design are embraced by programmers world-wide. In well-designed computer programs, each module does a small number of things well. There are specific and well-defined ways that a module talks with other modules. Modules are functionally independent; changes to one module will not affect other modules.

Contrast this with a tightly coupled machine. Parts in a tightly coupled machine are designed to run “like clockwork”. All the parts move in lock-step with each other.

A 19th century orrery: a model of our solar system with all its parts moving “like clockwork”.

There are problems designing programs with a tightly coupled design:

• The modules are large or everything is in one huge module.

• Changes to one module can change the behavior of other modules in unpredictable and undesired ways.

• As the computer program grows, it becomes increasingly difficult or impossible to have it behave correctly.

Our musculoskeletal structure is loosely coupled. Our bones don’t touch; there are no levers or fulcrums. We’re designed to move in a smooth and flowing fashion; we don’t move like a clock or any other tightly coupled machine.

If we are loosely coupled, why don’t we consistently move that way? And what does this have to do with Feldenkrais?

Our nervous system sends signals to multiple muscles simultaneously; such signals are the foundation of our posture and coordinated movement. Every movement in our bodies is a concert of dozens if not hundreds of muscles.

What happens when our nervous system works too hard? What if the system tensions muscles that are unnecessary—or even counterproductive—to hold a posture? What if some or all of our muscles are over-tensioned for the force needed for a particular movement? What if some don’t have sufficient tension? What if muscles tend to be fired together when they don’t need to be fired together? All of these patterns impose artificial couplings on our musculoskeletal system.

The results of artificial couplings are the same as a tight coupling:

• Extra effort and energy are needed in order to move.

• Changes to the position of one part of our body will disproportionally affect other parts of our body.

• Movement may feel stiff or awkward; range of movement will be limited.

• If the artificial coupling is in place a long time, it becomes increasingly difficult to move without pain and, ultimately, injury.

Feldenkrais classes, called Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons, allow students to discover where they have imposed those artificial couplings on themselves. The lessons are disruptive to counterproductive patterns of movement; they allow us to notice better ways to move. A programmer might describe Feldenkrais as a way to refactor your structural patterns.

Awareness is the key! Each lesson begins and ends with a benchmark: a way for each student to clearly measure the impact that the lesson has has on a range of motion, sense of balance, etc. Luxurious time is spent during the lesson to reestablish an awareness of the positions and pressures in our bodies. Moshé Feldenkrais was an engineer; odds are high his lessons will have a special appeal to engineers.

All body/mind disciplines are about altering the network of tensions in our body, but Feldenkrais specifically targets the artificial couplings that we have imposed on ourselves. If my explanation of Feldenkrais doesn’t make sense, don’t worry: Feldenkrais instructors don’t talk that way. Ultimately, the “why” may be the least important thing.

To find Feldenkrais classes, go to their website and see which local instructors offer ATM lessons. A variety of lessons are available in books, CDs, websites, but it’s really valuable to try a dozen or so lessons in a class setting first.

A PDF version of this article is available for download here.