Everybody has experienced the negative effects of muscles at some time or another. After a good afternoon nap one often feels listless with no energy to get up and walk. The body feels very heavy and lethargic. If one is exhausted, the muscles become very fatigued and lose most of their tone. Without muscle tone no physical activity is possible.
Loss of muscle tone not only increases the inertia but contributes extra heaviness to the body. As mentioned earlier, a sleeping child, a dead body or a paralysed person feels heavier than an active person. This happens for a variety of reasons and one is lack of muscle tone. In a stroke victim, where one half of the body is paralysed, the affected side feels heavier than the healthy one. The same blood flows through both the limbs and even though the affected side has weak or atrophied muscles with less volume, it feels heavier. Muscle tone is the only reason for this disparity in apparent weight, because the affected side does not have it.
Muscle tone is created by the subconscious part of the brain. Although these skeletal muscles are supposed to be controlled by a voluntary process of the conscious brain, certain aspects of their functions are involuntary. Anatomically the thalamus and cerebellum control gait, posture and muscle tone (see Figure above). These structures lie deep within the subconscious brain. In the thalamus there are nerve centres that control gait and muscle tone. When these centres are affected, due to lack of an essential chemical in them (domamine), the muscle tone and gait are affected and one becomes Parkinsonian. This is characterised by tremors, loss of facial expression and slow gait followed by sudden speeding up. These symptoms arise out of abnormalities of muscle tone. Excess tone leads to tremor and lack of it causes sluggishness.
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Medical science has not been able to study the functions of the subconscious brain, though it has gone as far as mapping the brain to show where different control zones are located. As detailed studies would have to be done in vivo, the task is virtually impossible. (It's rather like trying to find out how a computer works by X-raying it to see where all the components are located, without having the faintest idea what goes on inside the chips.) Here again, logic is our best bet to prove that such phenomena must be happening. Muscle tone is controlled by the involuntary system, as the conscious brain would simply not be able to manage with such a mammoth task. Therefore, muscle tone is just there whether we experience or control it or not. Exercises do help to build it up, but the threshold level, that which is always there, is beyond our control under normal circumstances.
Finally, medical science has left the question of how we control muscle tone unanswered. It vaguely describes it as a basal state of 'contraction' of muscles at rest and the source of control was mapped in the brain.
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