Podcast 129: Community Q&A

Do you ever suffer dizziness, double vision, sea sickness, or balance issues? In this episode, I discuss the relationship between the vestibular system and the visual system. They are so intertwined! If you want to learn more how the the brain, the eyes, and the vestibular system play together, please enjoy this presentation. SUMMARY KEYWORDSvestibular system, eyes, vestibular, brain, cerebellum, important, peripheral vision, called, astigmatism, seconds, stigmatism, head, inner ear, movements, boost, underactive, balance, create, part, week 00:05Good evening. Good. Good afternoon. Good morning, wherever you are. I'd like to welcome you to week number three. And it's great to be here. I hope that you find tonight's class. Well, let's just say informative, exciting, and eye opening. So, adventures in Gravity, this is a very important topic. And I want to spend some time discussing the connection between our inner ear and our eye, the ear eye connection or better known as the vestibular visual connection. So, the vestibular system is part of our, our ear auditory anatomy, and specifically, we're talking about the inner ear, the inner ear is critically important in our ability to orient in the world. And it is very connected to our eyes. And a lot of the situations that you have going on, could be at some level connected to the vestibular issues that we all go through. So, in this first slide, I define the vestibular system as the inner ear, and it's made up of the like little stones or bones. In the inner ear, we have the labyrinth, and we have the ear receptors. And it's these ear receptors that send information via the auditory nerve to a part of the brain called the cerebellum. And the cerebellum is also known as the little brain. And the cerebellum is responsible for our coordination, our precision and timing of movements, as well as motor learning. And if you watch the video that I sent you, on week three, there's a bilateral integration, where you're moving your arms and your legs and your head in your eyes. That is activating the connection between your vestibular system and your cerebellum. Now, part of the receptors that send information from the auditory nerve also go to another part of the brain called the survival brain now the survival brain. We touched into that in week one with the Moro reflex, the starfish, the morrow is part of our startle response. And the brainstem is the part of our brain that helps us navigate the fight flight freeze response. And you may recall that in the hierarchy of brain function, we start off operating from our reptilian brain, the survival brain, then we move to the cerebellum. And then finally, we move to the frontal brain called the cerebral cortex. So if we move on the receptors in these two brain centers, meaning the cerebellum and the brainstem actually then send information both to the eye muscles and to our cerebral cortex, now the function of the cerebral cortex. It's been known as our higher brain center, and it's designed for things like perception, sensation, memory, associations, thought, and voluntary physical action. Some have coined it the executive brain function, but you can see how involved the vestibular system is 04:45in our overall brain health. Now the vestibular system is a sensory system that is responsible for providing our brain with information about Motion, head position, spatial orientation, that's our depth perception. It's also involved in other motor functions that help us stabilize our head and body during movement. It's also important in our balance and our posture. That's the vestibular system is essential for our normal movement in equilibrium. And just a side note here, because some of you have asked questions about a stigmatism that a lot of times a stigmatism occurs when there is an irregularity in our posture, or head position, so let's say we,