Tensegrity Model: Your Body as a Memory Hard Drive

Where does intuition come from? What is the role of emotions in communication and decision-making? If you think you are mostly rational, surprise! Ninety-five percent of your decisions and actions are unconscious, emotional, or instinctive.

Memory is a key element of decision-making. We learned that memory is stored in synapses through neural connections. The general belief is that decisions are processed in the brain and involve a conscious, methodical sequence of rational steps. What if this is not all? In fact, it seems that the brain, consciousness, and rationality are just a small, inefficient part of it.

In The Unconscious Skill, I discuss recent discoveries of body structures and systems that complement the rational brain in memory storage and decision-making. The unconscious routes of decision and memory retrieval are thousands of times more efficient than the conscious brain.

Scientists are now discovering that fascia is an organ with functions related to mobility, strength, and direct communication with the nervous system. Anatomists, therapists and sport coaches are now learning what the traditional Chinese medicine knows for centuries. The conscious manipulation of fascia not only heals, but increases human power for movement and handling of physical and emotional forces. Tai Chi, Qigong, Kung Fu and Acupunture are examples of fascia training.

Muscular fascia is an independent system. Tom Myers and Robert Schleip popularized the concept of the fascia as tensegrity. It describes how the viscoelastic web, composed of collagen and water, holds the entire body – bones, organs, and individual cells – suspended by tension.

The number of sensors and nerve endings in the fascia is higher than on the muscle itself, making the fascia a very important sensory organ. It has a communication function between organs and brain. Experts suspect that muscular pain is an expression of fascia, not muscular sensors. It also means that body imprints of emotions like tension, stress, stiffness are likely a sensation on the fascia, not on muscles. Fascia is also involving every single organ; fascia sensors are also “monitoring” organic function, despite unconscious to our senses.

Why is this relevant? Fascia is a memory hard drive. It explains one of the sources of intuition. Experiences lead to rational and emotional reactions that we “feel” in our bodies, either pleasant or painful. Don’t you ever had that “gut feeling” of something not quite right but cannot explain why? These are emotional recognition of patterns from previous experiences stored somewhere. My hypothesis is that fascia store relevant experiences like scars, retrieved as intuition. The retrieval process is mediated by emotion.