How this atlas was made

What is measured, and what is representative

Body

The MakeHuman base mesh and its age targets (CC0), averaged across its ethnic targets, from infancy to ninety — male by default, with a Form control in the atlas settings that blends to female — smoothed by one level of Catmull–Clark subdivision.

Perforators

The counts come from the literature: on average 374 major perforators, each at least half a millimetre across, in about forty source-artery territories (Taylor & Palmer, 1987), and on the order of a hundred thousand small ones at 4–5 mm spacing, estimated from the area of the skin. Major perforators follow the connective-tissue framework, where surgeons find them: in rows beside the spine and breastbone, below the navel, across the buttock and along the septa between the muscles of the limbs (Tang et al., 2009; Ahmadzadeh et al., 2007). Where the skin is tethered — the scalp, the front of the face, the palms and soles — perforators are smaller and closer together (Taylor & Minabe, 1992; Whetzel & Mathes, 1992), so the small ones are drawn closer there, and each territory is an oval along the limb or across the trunk (Saint-Cyr et al., 2009). The rest is blue-noise sampling. Positions are representative, not a map of any one person: real perforators vary by centimetres between people and between sides.

Fascia

The superficial and deep fascia sit at typical depths for each region — thin over the scalp, face, hands and feet; thickest over the abdomen and buttocks. The exploded view opens the gliding plane and the fat by fixed gaps so the perforators crossing them can be seen; the depth control returns the layers to their anatomical depths. The deep channels — the walls between muscles, the raphes, and the sleeves around vessels and nerves — are drawn along their landmarks.

Trees

Each perforator joins its nearest larger vessel, and each major perforator its source artery, by the shortest path along the skin. Real source vessels run beneath the deep fascia; the trees are drawn near the surface so they can be read.

Knots

The model illustrates the theories; it is not a measurement. On the perforator view each site carries its vessel's tone, which is the hold, the sleeve where the vessel passes the fascia, and a nerve state, with time compressed so a release can be watched. It follows, in simplified form, what the simulation finds from measured numbers: a small artery holds itself shut; a press eases its wall, and the knot lets go as the press lifts, not under it; a parent's release frees most of the smaller knots it holds, never the reverse; and the sleeve, dried while the vessel was shut, stays stiff until the layer is moved. With age every perforator becomes likelier to hold — almost none in infancy, about a fifth in the thirties, two-thirds by the late fifties, approaching nine in ten — beginning where people report knots (neck and shoulders, the edges of the shoulder blades, the low back and hips, the jaw and belly) and spreading along the vessel trees. A young knot is small and changeable; an old one is larger and persists. Small knots are drawn as a warm tint on their perforator, medium and major ones as embers. It is an illustration of the perforator view, not a measurement: a census no one has yet taken. The vascular latch follows the same curve wherever smooth muscle wraps a tube — the small arteries of the skin and muscle, the great arteries, and the walls of the airways, gut and bladder (the organs themselves are not drawn). So do the other theories’ knots: trigger points in the taut bands of the muscles Travell and Simons mapped, densified patches in the gliding plane, sensitised nerves where they pierce the fascia, and — for perception — places felt on the skin that come and go, with nothing beneath them.

Release

In the atlas a double-click, or holding the pointer still, presses where it points; a single click selects (on a phone: a tap shows what lies under the finger, a double-tap releases, and a drag turns the figure). On the perforator view small knots let go at once and larger ones take more pressure; then, over about a second, the knots around move in to fill the space — the nearest first, each into a less crowded spot — so the area evens out. What let go does not come back: a worked area thins, and there are fewer knots over time, as people describe. A release never sets off another. In the other views a press does what each theory predicts: trigger points, patches, nerves and latches let go where they are, and a percept moves elsewhere at once. It is a model of those reports, not a measurement. Every theory’s knots are drawn the same way, in the same colour; only their place differs.

Maps

The fourteen channels of Chinese medicine and their 361 points are drawn from the WHO Western Pacific standard (2008): each point is placed by its own definition — proportional inches (cun) along a limb, a level and a distance from the midline on the trunk, a landmark on the head — on this figure, and each channel runs point to point along the skin. Names follow the standard numbering. The sinew channels follow the Ling Shu (chapter 13), with the places each binds (結), their courses simplified to the main lines; the trigger-point map marks the usual regions of 45 muscles, after Travell and Simons; and the tender points are the eighteen of the 1990 fibromyalgia criteria (Wolfe et al.), placed by their definitions. All are approximate, for comparison, and not for needling. Other traditions’ maps will follow.