Sensory inflow — what the measured field binds

At the same measured ephaptic coupling, eight sensory streams couple to their central relays, carrying γ cited verbatim from the neuro chain. The central substrate is unchanged; sensory drive loads onto it without seizing. Cross-relay senses organise only through the shared field (cancel < measured < augment); co-relay senses stay locked regardless. Whether cognition uses this is open.

The previous chapter coupled the twelve central organs to each other through the measured ephaptic field. This one feeds them the world. Eight sensory streams — vision, hearing, smell, taste, the somatosensory triad of touch, warmth and high-threshold pain carried on a single skin organ, plus balance and proprioception — cover the nine modalities the neuro chain emerged in its complete sensory atlas. Each stream carries a measured master-gene identity (γ read verbatim from neuro v1.10.1, never re-derived) and a cited dominant rhythm, and each is wired to one anatomical central relay — thalamus for vision, hearing, touch–warmth and pain; brainstem for taste and balance; the olfactory bulb for smell; the cerebellum for proprioception. The coupling is not a new constant: it is the same measured ephaptic fraction κ = 0.5496 the central organs already use. Three honest questions follow. Does sensory drive load onto the central field, or overwhelm it? The substrate's anchor order is unchanged (R = 0.328, byte-identical to the frozen M9 value) and with all eight streams driving it the central order sits at R ≈ 0.323 — still above the uncoupled baseline, still far below lock: input loads without seizing, robust to ±20% band shifts. Do distinct senses organise across modalities, and if so through what? The decisive non-circular test says only through the shared field: cross-relay sense pairs reach a cross-modal phase-locking of 0.018 with the field cancelled, 0.057 at the measured strength and 0.108 augmented, while co-relay pairs on the same organ stay locked at ≈0.32 regardless. And does cognition use any of this? That stays open, with the same in-vivo experiment owed.

Eight streams, the nine modalities, one measured field

The sensory side is not invented here; it is inherited. The neuro chain's complete sensory atlas (neuro §20) emerged nine modalities from measured master genes: the five special senses — vision (PAX6), hearing (PAX2), smell (LHX2), taste (POU2F3) and the vestibular sense of balance (ATOH1) — together with a somatosensory triad carried on one skin organ (touch via PIEZO2, warmth via thermoreceptors, and high-threshold pain via nociceptors, PRDM12) and proprioception (RUNX3). One organ, three submodalities: that is why eight afferent nodes cover nine senses.

Each node enters Felt Cognition carrying the same measured bistable γ the neuro chain read from the SantaLucia nearest-neighbour metric — copied digit-for-digit, with the source file's sha256 recorded in the atlas so the citation is auditable, never re-fetched and never re-fitted. Each also carries a dominant rhythm whose identity is cited to the sensory-physiology literature — gamma flutter for vision and touch, the 40 Hz band for hearing, the slow sniff and tonic rhythms of smell, taste and balance, theta for pain, the alpha tremor of proprioception — while the absolute centre frequency in hertz is a representative value, held open, not tuned to any model target.

Anatomy fixes the wiring. Each afferent stream couples reciprocally to exactly one central organ, the relay its biology actually projects through: vision, hearing, touch–warmth and pain to the thalamus (the sensory gateway); taste and balance to the brainstem; smell, uniquely, straight to the olfactory bulb, bypassing the thalamus exactly as olfaction does; and proprioception to the cerebellum. No stream is wired to a relay to make a number come out; the map is the textbook one.

The coupling is the central organs' own κ — not a new constant

The single most important honesty point in this chapter is that M10 introduces no new tunable parameter at all. The strength at which every sensory stream couples to its relay is the identical measured ephaptic fraction the central organs use among themselves: the depolarisation ΔV_m = 0.2748 mV as a fraction of the 0.5 mV entrainment threshold neuro §19 measured — κ = 0.5496. The afferent kernel is the byte-identical near-field kernel of §13 (the same ∼1/r³ locality, the same row-normalisation). Sensory inflow is therefore not a new physics bolted on; it is the same field doing the same thing across one more boundary.

Sensory input loads onto the central field — it does not seize it

The first empirical question is whether driving the central substrate with eight external streams loads it usefully or overwhelms it. The test is built to be unfoolable: the central block is the frozen M9 system, and its anchor order is required to be byte-identical to the value §13 froze. It is — R = 0.328330589, matching M9 exactly — so whatever happens next is the effect of adding sensory drive, not of quietly changing the substrate underneath.

With all eight afferent streams coupled in at the measured strength, the central organs settle at R ≈ 0.323 — fractionally below the unforced anchor, comfortably above the uncoupled baseline (≈0.25), and nowhere near global lock (R = 1, a seizure). Sensory inflow loads onto the central field: it perturbs the operating point slightly without either silencing the brain or driving it into runaway synchrony. Perturbing every band by ±20% leaves the system in this same bounded, lifted regime, so the result is not an artifact of the particular frequencies chosen.

Cross-modal binding rides the shared field — the non-circular test

The deeper question is whether distinct senses come to organise together, and — crucially — whether they do so because of the shared field or merely because they were driven at once. The design separates those two explanations cleanly. Cross-relay sense pairs sit on different central organs, so any phase relationship between them must travel through the central ephaptic field that bridges those organs. Co-relay pairs share the same relay, so they can lock through that common drive whether or not the field bridges anything — they are the field-independent control.

Run at three field strengths, the result is unambiguous. Cross-modal phase-locking across relays is 0.018 with the field cancelled, 0.057 at the measured strength, and 0.108 augmented — a monotone cancel < measured < augment ordering, a causal contribution of +0.039 from cancelling to the measured field. The co-relay control, meanwhile, stays pinned at ≈0.32 across all three strengths — field-independent, exactly as a control should be. Distinct senses therefore bind across modalities only through the shared ephaptic field; the binding is field-mediated, not an artifact of common input. This is the same non-circular logic the §13 coordination test used, now applied to sensory integration.

Fast streams ride loosely, slow streams lock — and that is the right biology

Resolving the coupling per modality shows a gradient that the model was not told to produce. The slow tonic streams lock tightly to their relay — taste and balance at a relay phase-locking of ≈0.997, proprioception at ≈0.981 — while the fast streams ride loosely: vision at ≈0.29, smell at ≈0.21, hearing at ≈0.42. A slow afferent rhythm sits comfortably inside the central field's own slow envelope and entrains; a fast gamma-band stream samples many central cycles and couples weakly. That a tonic balance signal should hold a steadier phase than a flickering visual gamma stream is exactly what sensory physiology would expect — the ordering falls out of the measured rhythms and the one measured coupling, with nothing fitted.

Open: does cognition use it?

Everything above is a verified mechanism: at the measured coupling the field can carry sensory input onto the central organs, bind distinct senses cross-modally, and do so without seizing — reproducibly, bit-for-bit. That is what the simulation establishes.

What it does not establish is that biological cognition uses this sensory–central coupling. That remains open, and the obstacle is the same one §13 named: the behaviour-labelled, field-cancel-vs-augment intracranial recording owed in neuro §9 and §19 has not been performed. Until it is, medium_efficacy_tested stays 0 — the model supplies the prediction, the experiment is still owed, and no link in this chapter is claimed to be causal for experience. The open problem of §12 stands untouched.