Artificial spin ice lattices consist of extended arrays of dipole coupled nanomagnets. This relatively simple system has seen a striking amount of applications, such as mimicking spin frustration, reconfigurable magnonic crystals, and in the last years it displayed potential for novel forms of computation. We have recently investigated the effects of the internal texture of these nanomagnets, specifically the thermal behavior, and found the excitation of magnons, and additional fluctuations at the ends of the nanomagnet. These effects offer a different view of the effect of temperature on the magnetism than the traditional flipping of the Ising spin. Here, we present measurements using AC susceptibility and temperature dependent MOKE of artificial spin ice structures, which indicate the presence of these additional texture fluctuations. It is shown that, even though they exist on a different length scale than the binary switch of the internal magnetization, both types of fluctuations can be tuned through the interaction strength of the mesospins. In addition, we present a detailed simulation study that shows the effects of coupling of these texture fluctuations across a gap, both in a double magnet configuration and an ASI vertex, and capture these fluctuations in energy landscapes. We determine the energy barriers, eigenmodes, and curvatures of the energy landscapes at the metastable minima and relate them to the attempt frequencies of the system. These investigations of the internal texture could lead to a rethinking of the artificial spin ice lattice, in which case the internal textures could be used to mimic magnetic effects on different length scales.