How tongues stick out
• • by Paul Ingraham
Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.
“Muscular hydrostats” are cool. 😎 Tongues, elephant trunks, and octopus/squid tentacles are the classic muscular hydrostats. Basically, you can change the shape of a “water balloon” by squeezing it — and a tube full of muscles is like a water ballon that can squeeze itself into different shapes. Kooky.

Tongues are muscular hydrostats.