Senses and Perception - Somatic Anatomy

1. Intro

Our senses connect us and illuminate the world for us. In this workshop we will travel through the senses, their embryological origins, their function and integration into our lives: Touch, taste, balance,equilibrium, proprioception, hearing, smelling and vision, as well as interoception….and let us not forget our ability to perceive VIBRATION.

Going into the Senses at the end of year ONE of your training means that we have set up our bodies to locomote, move, dance and explore the world, relationships, as well as the material in this training. This is the way a baby adds in the senses, one by one they expand and become more prominent in guiding the child’s actions. We are following the mylienation path of the senses embryonically, then moving through the developmental movement patterns. Here we will experience the baby being born with a strong sense of combining movement and touch experience, and then with gravity the proprioceptors start adding in much more feedback for their movement.

This trio of moving, while receiving feedback from the muscle spindles, the touch sensors and proprioceptors in the joints and skin gives information on space and time that the brain can begin to weave a 3 dimensional sense of movement. This “practicing” starts to incorporate the extra senses of smell, taste, hearing and seeing as well as the inner sensations of the organs, the heart, temperature - general wellbeing. The brain also charts the emotions that flow through the relating, nursing, playing and exploring that babies do.

Now the brain knows what is possible and can plan. So whenever you get tired or confused of sensing: go back to movement! Free up the sensing, go to your feelings, your impulses, rhythms and play: the senses RIDE movement - sensing does not develop in a vacuum, it develops in relationship, in family, in nature, in community. Lets begin!

At the training somatizations and movement explorations will allow you to discover their own pathways of these special senses and their role in development. We will learn through movement, touch and discussion, how scientific-based information is embodied into experience.

When you approach the senses, remember that we evolutionarily came from the sea: all of our sense organs have in some way recreated or preserved this fluid heritage. Our smell and taste must go through a mucous layer, binding with water to reveal itself to the sense organ. Let your mouth water, imagine the surfaces of your nostrils to be moist. Our eyes are globes of seawater, our inner ear is floating within a bony home. You must let yourself back into this realm, going back to the endocrine state of awareness of the ocean all around you in community.s

2. Equilibrium

Inner Ear

The lateral line system is responsible for the sixth sense which allows fish to detect movement around them and changes in water flow. Detecting movement helps fish find prey or escape from predators.

Because water is so dense, it propagates pressure waves very well. The lateral line “sense” detects and interprets these pressure waves and this allows fish to become aware of very low frequency vibrations such as those generated by a tail beat or nearby relative movement. Under poor visibility conditions, which are quite common underwater, the lateral line sense becomes extremely valuable in feeding.

The receptor for the lateral line system is the neuromast. This small structure consists of a flexible, jellylike cupula resting on a mass of sensory cells. The sensory cells have hairs embedded in the cupula. Amazingly the lateral line system also enables a fish to detect a motionless object by the movement of water deflected by that object.

The way that a fish detects an object with its lateral line and the way you hear music with your inner ear are quite similar. Both processes share the same basic mechanism, sensory cells with cilia detect vibrations and send this information to the brain. Predators can determine the size, speed, direction and perhaps even the species of an actively moving fish from its hydrodynamic trace. That is the pressure waves generated by movement. 

https://activeanglingnz.com/2017/01/03/the-lateral-line-a-fishs-sixth-sense/

Inner Ear - The Semicircular Canals

Deep within the temporal bone, protected by this bone and bathed in fluids are two senses: Equilibrium and hearing. 

Three fluid-filled loops contain fluid and fine, hairlike sensors that help register balance. The nerve fibers sitting in a widened chamber in the loop, register the velocity of flow. They are hair fibers stabilized in a hillock of supporting cells which reach into the loop. 

 The loops are in approximately 90 degree angle to each other, see images to orient which angles are represented. You can find the horizontal plane if you sit and then let your head nod forward to its natural stop: this is the angle of one of the loops, then raise your head 90 degrees up and again find the natural stop. This will be the next angle. If you tilt your head to each side to a natural stop you will find the other plane. The right and left side work together to establish balance. 

It is interesting that the endolymph in the semicircular canals lag behind the movement of the head in the beginning and end of a motion, or in changes to velocity, and therefore the hairs are bent in either direction. Should the person keep moving at a constant these nerves in the ampulla will stop reporting, the hair/ cilia are not affected. This means that they capture dynamic motion, acceleration deceleration in all three planes. Do you allow the freeflow of the periorgan fluid? Do you allow your head to move in 3 dimensional space in differing velocities, starts and stops? What would happen on a circular ride at a fair? When would your inner ear stop reporting change?

There are also little stones laying in a gel substance in the utricle and saccule which are in a vestibule, called otoliths. These hair cells, macula  detect gravity, as the stones drag and fall when the person changes their head position. They can determine if you are standing on your back or upside down, yet they cannot measure momentum, velocity.  

At the base of the canals are the utricle and saccule, each containing a patch of sensory hair cells. Within these cells are tiny stones that help monitor the position of your head in relation to gravity and linear motion

The lateral line is present in most fish and is used to sense tiny vibrations in the water. It is situated just under the skin (subcutaneous) on the snout and along either side of the shark’s body. The lateral lines are canals that are filled with fluid. Tiny modified hair cells line its walls and are instrumental in sensing vibrations and movement.

These structures are so well tuned that they are able to detect frequencies as low as 25 Hertz. As vibrations make contact with these hair-like cells, they move and sway within the liquid. This causes messages to be transported via nerves to the brain, providing important information regarding the whereabouts and nature of the vibrations detected.

Interestingly, the lateral line can also locate odour plumes. Usually, fish and sharks will use the combination of smell and turbulence detection at the same time. This process is called "eddy chemotaxis". When a person, seal or other animal moves through the water, they leave behind them a wake (turbulence), which is infused with their body smell (odour). This is referred to as an "eddy". While it is optimal for the shark to be able to see its prey, it is really the combination of the lateral line and its sense of smell that makes for prime hunting abilities and opportunities for the animal. 

https://www.sharksinfo.com/lateral-line.html

Our sense of home/ sense of knowing  where we are depends on this sense. Finding your equilibrium through movement allows you to find inner balance, inner calm and presence.  It provides the base from which you can start your perceptions and actions in the world. Most other senses depend on this underlying sense. Knowing your center of focus allows your hearing to be precise and directed and relaxed, knowing your horizon sets the plane for seeing. 

3. Touch

It is natural to seek out touch in community, family and intimate relationships, in general expanding the time spent in safe and joyful touch contributes greatly to overall health. As somatic practitioners we need to be aware that touch creates intimacy, especially in those clients with a lack of good touch; using clear language and agreements before and during touch is helpful.

You may want to consider your manner of greeting and saying goodbye to your client: creating clear good connection, respect and trust is more important than a hug!It is also not necessary to touch during a session to give your client connection to self and their process, to learn. The overarching hope is to support clients to a state where they can give and receive touch as nourishment and communication, allowing them to integrate their movement and touch, and make choices in their relationships on touch.

4. Smelling

The wheel of sensing

ORIENTING FACE HEAD & OTHER SENSES FROM THIS CENTER

• All senses relate to each other through center

• Find the weighted balance of all these senses around the wheel

• Use to signal alignment in neck

5. Tasting

TONGUE

As a baby our first limb is the mouth. The nose provides a bobbing midline orientation, which the mouth follows. Our mouth can reach for the world and, through sucking or biting, bring parts of that world into our bodies, which becomes us, our cells - this is necessary and fabulous and our other limbs learn from the mouth leading the head and the body.

 The baby explores its world, tasting, and using the mouth to envelope food, first of course: Breast milk. The baby smells it, noses it, grabs the nipple, latches on and sucks all while snuggling into the mother’s body. Bottle-fed babies experience a broader range of people to trust while nursing, and the search for the nipple can be encouraged by letting the baby find the bottle and reach to grab it, then flex the mouth and neck and body into a suckling-snuggle.

After we test the odor of food and decide to eat it, our lips and mouth sample the texture of the food and then our teeth bite it up into smaller pieces. This allows us to glory in the full flavor experience (or spit it out). 

Our taste buds are embedded in the papillae as well as in the back of the mouth and on the palate. Every person has between 5,000 and 10,000 taste buds. Each taste bud consists of 50 to 100 specialized sensory cells, 10% of which are replenished each day. 

Some scientists now say that these taste cells are distributed across the whole tongue and not clustered into areas. 

The main tastes that we distinguish through the taste buds are:

• Sweet

• Sour

• Salty

• Bitter

• Umami

We taste a combination of these five, yet all the finer sense of taste is actually in the odors of food. Try tasting food without smell, or when you have a cold, to notice the difference.

So the senses of taste and smell are intertwined and converge in the brain to establish what we call flavor.

6. Hearing

ears

All of the structures of hearing are in the temporal bone, protected by the bony structure. When sound hits the eardrum, that frequency gets translated through the 3 middle ear bones, to the oval window . This movement creates a wave through the perilymph, all the way up the spiral of cochlea, around the apex and back down again to the round window where the waves are dampened. Sound waves are transformed into fluid waves. 

The three smallest bones in the body are in the middle ear: the stapes, the incus, and malleolus, which are suspended in the middle ear, have their own ligaments and muscles, with which they can change the tone of the eardrum. For the most part, they transfer sound waves into fluid waves. The fluid in the hearing part of the inner ear is continuous with the fluid in the utricle and saccule. And, fluid in the middle ear can drain into the back of the throat through the Eustacian tube. 

The eardrum is able to protect you from loud sounds -- it changes its tone. With low sounds, it can tighten the membrane to tune into lower sounds, which then the middle ear bones transfer into fluid waves that we can perceive.

The cochlea is about 30 mm long. The organ of perception is called the organ of Corti, which lays in the third tube that also winds its way up to the apex of the cochlea. It is filled with endolymph. The hairs of the organ of Corti stick out and are able to perceive the movement ….

The organ of Corti is in the third duct. It has hairs. Over it, floats and hovers a tetorial membrane that vibrates with the pressure waves of sound. The movement of these hairs in the organ of Corti are recorded and sent to the brain through the auditory nerve. These nerves are specialized, organized into high and low tones, where they are most accurately able to perceive sound in a certain range. Low tones in the beginning and high tones towards the apex of cochlea. These nerve impulses are sent to both the left and right side of the brain, simultaneously (the auditory cortex). 

What the nerves are actually recording - is the difference between the perilymph and the endolymph at the membrane. The spiral of the cochlea has the perilymph going up and down in the spiral - two compartments are filled with this perilymph. In between them is the endolymph in a fibrous membrane.

Attentive listening helps bring our head higher into space. So the homolateral pattern requires us to come into our hearing sense and then switch between left and right hemispheres, left and right ears, left and right cochlea. If you find yourself unable to get your belly off the ground, you might be missing this step in homolateral. Or you might be missing the sense of equilibrium established in the spinal pattern and homologous (mostly homologous). 

A Somatization

Take a moment to close your eyes, sit comfortably and breathe. Start to tune into your hearing, knowing that it is based on fluid waves in a spiral cochlea. Both cochlea are situated behind your eyes, close to midline. Then start noticing what you hear. Notice the three dimensionality of your hearing. How do you know that you are hearing something on your left side? Or behind you? Allow your head to move gently, and then, allowing some light into your eyes, crawl or move around the space, oriented by your auditory interest. Come back to sitting, open your eyes, and notice any differences in your state.

7. Seeing

eyes

Seeing is allowing light to fall into your eyes

As complex and amazing the eye is, it is essential to know that most of the tension in our necks, forehead and eye muscles are not contributing to our ability to see!

Let’s return to the act of RECEIVING light.

You may want to close your eyes for a while, rest, breathe and allow the fluid orb of the eye to float on the fatty layers of the bony orbit. Light must pass through the cornea, the lens, the vitreous fluid of the eyeball and finally fall into the retina! From there the optic nerves report this light into the visual cortex of the brain. Most of the fibers cross the midline behind the pituitary at the optic chiasm , and some fibers travel along the same side.

The fovea is the center of our vision in the retina, it has accurate vision in the direction where it is pointed. The small area is less than 1% of the area of the full retina but supplies over half of the information going to the  visual cortex in the brain. It cannot see objects in low light, so to see such things we need to employ our peripheral vision, and thus the areas of the retina away from this center. Note that the nerves meet and exit the eye at the optic disk, where there are no receptors and thus a blindspot for our vision. The nerve bundles are at an interior angle toward the back and center of the brain - so they are not in the center of our vision.

8. Proprioception

9. Interoception

Getting to know your INNER STATE of being

How do we know ourselves from the inside?

We are constantly appraised of our heartbeat, temperature, sensations of digesting, breathing, hunger or satiation, which give us a sense of our inner environment. We are tender creatures inside, interoception describes all the ways that we can gauge our state of being and differentiate/ notice when our inner sense of self is off.

Hopefully during our development through infancy we established a secure bond to ourselves and others, which relies on this sense of inner equilibrium, the summary of metabolic functions where we recognize self

10. Embryology

For the embryology of the senses it is helpful to look at the developing head and face, which rapidly grow after the neural tube is created. Even while the neural tube is zipping together from the center up and down, it still is open on the top and bottom, while the senses of the head start to develop.

Below you can see the embryo from the front: the nasal openings are where we would expect the eyes to be - but the eyes are still on each side of the head. Interestingly there is a ligament that connects the eyes, so that the distance between them stays the same as the brain grows and folds tremendously: this growth brings the eyes to the front.

Most sense organs start with little thickening patches of cells on the ectoderm/ skin, which are called placodes. Often then some kind of invagination begins: the nasal openings, the eyes.

11. Touch and Movement Principles

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12. Integration

The senses do not act alone - they coordinate with other senses : we have access to a 3 dimensional sensory matrix that puts our experience and then our expectations of an experience to gage a new experience. Imagine you arrive home, expecting the house to be dark and the dog to come racing up to you as soon as you turn the key in the lock, yet you arrive home with bright lights and no dog: you will now pay attention and think about that discrepancy, before you enter.

Senses can replace one another: Blind people can develop a keen sense of taste and hearing, people with equilibrium problems can use their eyes to know what is up and down. If you lose your smell, you will look more carefully at the meat you are about to cook, for visual signs of mold or shininess.

We develop a sense of integration as we go through the developmental patterns. In each we integrate new sensations:

1. In the prespinal patterns we integrate interoception and proprioception

2. in Spinal a sense of nosing and mouthing

3. in Homologous a sense of equilibrium and stability for tasting and eating

4. In homolateral we separate and integrate each ear to hear on both sides of our head

5. In contralateral we finally really employ vision and seeing as we move swiftly though space