Monday, April 1, 2013

Postulate 5 revisited

5) The way I use my tongue, eyes and face is the foundation for my right handedness.

I stayed away the hyoid bone and it's muscular links in my first attempt with postulate 5.

lateral view with muscles attached

sagitttal view

Hyoid shape

Skeletal location

Muscular connections.
Superior


Inferior

Hyoid description wiki

It is easy to discount the hyoid because most of my life I had no idea it existed. Therefore the muscular control must not be important.  But most of the actions that I do I have no idea of what I actually do. I learned to move in response to the demands of society and my environment. If I perceived I had a very threatening environment it would make sense to me that I would adapt defensive positions in my musculature in response.

My general feeling is that I am very uptight. I believe my highly innervated small musculature in my throat would be the first link in the chain if I was under threat. The hyoid elevates and moves posteriorly to choke off the wind pipe. Nothing gets in or out. If I learned at a very young age to be quiet, stop crying while being threatened and it became habit, how could I ever learn to relax those muscles?

I remember taking tests when I went back to school in my mid thirties. I was often the first to finish but there are sometimes I wondered if I ever took a breath in the whole test. There was an anxiety that propelled me to finish that mounted as the test went on. It is very easy for one person tell  another "Relax, and Breathe.". It is usually helpful for a second. I have played with abdominal breathing for years and it helps briefly when I am doing it. No one has ever said "Relax your stylohyoid muscles." Nor would it make sense. The muscles of my upper throat are almost inaccessible due to their familiarity. In a way it is who I am.

The hyoid has a shape that reminds me of the sissy bar of a banana seat bike that I had as a kid. What if I had better inhibitory control on one side as compared to the other due to the conscious control of speech? Most refined movement is carefully controlled between inhibition(relaxation) and contraction. Muscular activation always pull in both direction as essentially the muscle just contracts. One side may be fixed by other larger muscles or structures but the pull is in two directions. In walking muscles often play two different roles depending if my lower extremity is in swing or stance. Do I do the same in the mechanics of speech?
My feeling is that I use the left tongue in a more contracted sense to give the right side more freedom of movement. I have the same feeling in the rest of my use of my muscular-skeletal system. It is not that my left is unable but that it learned in sense to be subservient to my right. Others quite possibly can incorporate both to a much higher level than me.





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