Quotes About Spindles

The Golgi tendon organs are found among the collagen bundles of the tendons, in the border zone where the muscle fibers are attached to the tendons. Although they are located in the connective tissue of the tendon rather than in the midst of the muscle cells, they are, like the spindles, minute gauges for the efforts of the alpha muscle fibers.

And as with the sensory elements of the motor spindles, the pathways carrying the sensory information from the Golgis are culminated in the ganglia of the brain stem, with very few direct connections to the conscious cortical areas. We normally receive no more conscious sensation from the Golgis than we do from the muscle spindles; their information is processed and responded to primarily in the brain stem and the spinal cord, beneath our level of conscious awareness.

When we peer into the fine structures of their tissue, we discover that our muscles turn out to be full of sense organs, and very fine sense organs at that. The principle kind, the muscle spindles, are the most elaborate sensory structures in the body outside the eyes and ears.8

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

A key example is a human cell, which is the simplest thing in biology. When it comes to how it divides, biologists will talk about spindles forming and dividing chromosomes, but they are merely describing what the cell is doing.

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.