Continues from The Electric Heart
We saw in the last installment that the Electric Heart is vital for pumping plasma through the circulatory system, but how does it beat and how does our body move?
Rather like a marionette puppet, our moving parts have strings attached. In the case of our heart, we even call these our Heart Strings, but speaking more generally these strings are called tendons. A tendon is a cord-like tissue rather like a vein, but filled with strong tubular cells that can contract or shorten upon electric impulse. Their structure resembles a fibre optic cable (or even a Birkeland current) and this structure makes them very strong and allows current to flow down them.
Tendons attach themselves to other tissues and when they receive an electric impulse their cells will contract making the tendon shorten and pulling any other tissues they are anchored to closer together. But how do the cells contract on demand?
If we recall from the first discussion of the Electric Cell Model the cell nucleus acquires charge from it’s DNA antenna, this charge immediately expands an electro-magnetic field around the nucleus just like the Sun pushing out it’s sphere of influence in the solar system.
The boundary of this field is where it meets electro-magnetic opposition from it’s environment, the stronger the charge the greater the sphere (not a true sphere but shaped by the outside forces). When a tendon cell is “activated” it expends some of it’s charge causing it’s field to diminish and it’s dimensions to shrink until it is recharged.
But this electric impulse requires a large burst of energy and tendons that are in frequent use require a reliable reserve to cope with periods of high demand. This is where muscles come in.
Muscle tissue is similar to tendon tissue except that it’s function is to acquire energy over time and store it chemically within it’s cells. Muscle cells form where tendons need to work hard and they grow a mass around the tendons to store electricity, they behave like a self-organizing battery. The hard working tendons consume energy, when their ambient supply is used up they will drain energy from their adjacent muscle cells until those muscles are also drained, at which point mechanical function ceases. Working tendons hard encourages the body to reserve more energy for them in the form of more muscle cells as any body-builder knows.
Tendons operate in pairs so that one pulls one way and the other pulls back again. This is more apparent in the case of our limbs. Tendons attach themselves to our bones in two places to pull back and forth as required. When the tendon has to work hard it will begin to grow additional muscle cells around it’s centre to provide a greater reserve of energy. The muscle is not directly attached to the bone, it is the tendon that provides mechanical movement, the muscles are the power supply.