Polite Dissent

4 Responses to “ Uncanny X-Men #446: A Medical Review ”

1. Jon Silpayamanant
   September 10th, 2004 at 12:36 am
   

   What if he’s talking about controlling voluntary actions by
   changing the acetylcholinergic neural firing
   in the parasympathetic nervous system to use it as a
   means of controlling her? In other words, if the Fury has control over Sage’s
   involuntary functions as well as the voluntary ones, wouldn’t this make the
   control complete? If the Fury only controlled the voluntary functions, there’s
   nothing to prevent the involuntary functions to override its control–whereas controlling
   both would solidify its control over her major voluntary functions as there’d
   be nothing physiologically to prevent complete control.

   I’ve always wondered about things like this–just because you’ve got
   control over another person doesn’t mean that you’d be able to prevent them from,
   say, puking if you made them do something that would cause that type of involuntary
   response. Having complete control would seem (to me at least) to imply needing to have
   control over involuntary functions as well.

2. Scott
   September 10th, 2004 at 2:09 pm
   

   The voluntary and involuntary nervous systems innervate two different types of muscles. Skeletal muscles are controlled by the voluntary nervous system, whereas smooth muscles (heart, gut) are controlled by the involuntary system. There is a little bit of overlap, particularly in the lungs (you can voluntarily control your rate of breathing, for instance), but for the most part they are completely separate systems.

   Controlling the voluntary system should be enough to control voluntary movements. The motion may be a bit jerky — a la Robocop — because I’m not sure how well the spinal reflexes could be controlled. I don’t think someone could “break control” with the involuntary system because it controls different muscles.
   If someone wants complete control over someone else’s body, then they would need to control both the voluntary and involuntary systems. This would be a much riskier proposition because of having to control the victim’s heart rate, breathing, GI system, etc. without much real gain.

   Also remember that the involuntary nervous system is composed of two opposing systems: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic controls the “fight or flight” response and the parasympathetic shuts that response down. Neither directly affects voluntary muscles. The sympathetic system is only partially controlled by acetylcholine, so the Fury could not gain control over it in the situation described above.

3. Jon Silpayamanant
   September 12th, 2004 at 2:10 am
   

   I recognize the difference between the two different systems, but I think the issue is about
   a definition of control…I think the operative phrase is “to solidify its control over her major
   voluntary functions” which doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “to have complete control
   over only the voluntary function”…I guess a counter-example would be, say Sage has some
   sort of telekinetic ability, and what if this telekinetic ability is as much if not moreso controlled
   by her subconcious or that she reflexively has more telekinetic power when reacting (much like how under
   extreme stress or duress our adrenaline kicks in)…then having control over voluntary functions might not
   be able to over-ride the instinctive reflex to used the telekinetic power to overcome muscular motion.

   Just a thought, and I really could care less to defend Claremont here, but if if control means merely coltrol
   over voluntary functions it might be not so “solidified” if it can be over-ridden by involuntary actions…

   Ok, I’m done now… :)

4. Jack Hare
   November 12th, 2008 at 2:21 am
   

   What constitutes a minor voluntary function?

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