The five bony landmarks of cerebellar cognition in the deep core musculoskeletal architecture.

The five bony landmarks of cerebellar cognition in the deep core musculoskeletal architecture.

What is a bony landmark? It is very simply a major prominent bone located in the center of one of the major junctures of the body. This bone is shaped like a grip, handle, or lever and is anchored deep in the array of other bones and muscles, elastic connective tissue, nerves and other tissues that radiate from it. We can understand it as a grip-shaped model of the system it regulates, an internal model, or as a cybernetic servomechanism with complex feedback, a type of sophisticated control interface. We can easily understand the bones, all shaped as grips or handles, to function like affordances inviting an intuitive, intimate grip-like relationship with the core structure.Because the purpose of the system, the postural core, is to provide stability, balance, and resilience, the metaphor of the grip becomes quite powerful.

Cerebellar cognition is well understood to be intrinsic, uniform, coordinating, intrinsic and integrative. This matches perfectly the behavior of the tonic system of postural muscles located in the structural center of the body. We have many different ways of understanding, across cultures and history, the energetic signature and body plan for this core system. We already know this part of ourselves very deeply in many different ways with different names and interpretations. When we add a modern kind of anatomical specificity this somewhat mystical focus of our awareness, it renders it in almost crystal clarity.

The landmarks make visible a simple body map but not the map of life seen from the outside. Anatomy has always shown us what the body looks like on the inside from the outside. The bony landmarks of the deep core body map point us toward the part of us that sees life from the inside. The bony landmarks create a map to a part of us that sees from the inside, and communicates it’s cerebellar knowledge in way that reflects its unique neurophysiology.

All of that is already contained within the bony affordance itself.