okay, so the plan was to write a summary of a neuroscience paper every day this summer, starting today. I wrote up some code and made a folder of papers, one of which will be randomly delivered to me each morning.
However.
This morning's paper was very focused on describing the details of the anatomy of the vestibular organs of the little brown bat, a project that does not lend itself easily to Quick Tumblr Summarization. It's neat, but not something I really want to write about. So I'll start tomorrow.
If you're interested in anatomy papers from the 1980s though, give this one a shot!
Ramprashad, F., Landolt, J.P., Money, K.E., & Laufer, J. (1980). Neuromorphometric features and dimensional analysis of the vestibular end organ in the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus). The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 192:883-902.
To speak of Qi Gong, especially the forms we use in MMQG, as a neurodivergent praxis is to step entirely outside the architectures of both the modern wellness industry and the rigid lineages of classical transmission that have too often become bound by their own ritual formalism.
It is to address the question of how the divergent nervous system, with its irregular firing patterns, unusual…
I've had the wonderful experience of sitting next to my sister on a plane, who never fails to bring her ginger ale back to light of day just as we land. It made me wonder why some people get nauseous in cars, planes, boats, etc. So, I'm going to explain how the vestibular system works, how it integrates with your ocular input, and why this makes some people feel sick.
The Vestibular System
This is the system within the inner ear consisting of the otolith organs (utricle and saccule) and the semicircular canals (there's three of those). It sits next to your cochlea within the inner ear, and the same cranial nerve (CN VIII) innervates both of them.
The semicircular canals detect the three planes of head rotation (yes, no, and ear to ear movements). The utricle senses movement in the horizontal plane, and the saccule senses it in the vertical plane (like the force of gravity). They each have these little plates of hair cells and some rocks on top of a gelatinous mass (it's true, look it up) that move to polarize or depolarize cells as their direction changes.
The Integration of Vestibular and Ocular Information
CN VII heads to the brainstem, where it enters through the pontomedullary junction. From there, it projects through the inferior cerebellar peduncle to the flocculonodular lobes of the cerebellum, or to the vestibular nuclei (of which there are four). From there, the information is used to determine head position, and make the appropriate neck, core, limb, and eye corrections to maintain balance.
Within the cerebellum, vestibulo-ocular information is organized and acted upon. You also get some positional information from your eyes. These systems are pretty well connected. Let's see what happens when they don't match up.
Motion Sickness
When you are in a car, your vestibular system can detect acceleration (same thing on a boat or plane), however, the objects in front of you aren't moving. This gives your brain two different signals, one that you are moving and one that you aren't. This is also why people with car sickness shouldn't try to read and should look out the window, it gives their eyes movement signals to send.
The opposite is true with people who get sick from VR head sets or video games. Their eyes are sending that they are moving, and their vestibular system senses no motion. This is confusing for the brain.
Why This Happens
There are a few theories, and some are more ass than others. I'll go from least stupid to most stupid. The one we learn in medical school is that the conflicting signals are just confusing for the brain, and this makes you feel sick. Simple as that. Your vestibular system can get used to constant velocity (and you can overcome seasickness if you became a sailor), so this answer isn't totally great. But it works.
There is also an anticipation component. That would be why a driver would experience less motion sickness than a passenger. In my mind, they're also usually looking ahead and seeing the car move, not fiddling with Spotify on their phone (hopefully) so that could be part of it too.
Another theory is that the sensations produced are similar to the feeling we get from toxic substances (which are detected by the area postrema, which makes us vomit), so our brain does the vomiting reflex again...the only sources I could find for this were an article from 1977 and a book on how to set up virtual realities from 2015, so I am not sure I like this one.
I don't know, mostly the cause of this is unknown and I'm not sure that anyone is really out there gunning for the answer to it. We can fix it and people can get over it, so there's probably better things to spend grant money on.
Treatment
Drugs.
Drugs work in the short term, and they are usually anticholinergic or antihistaminergic. The most common ones are scopolamine patches/pills, meclizine, dimenhydrinate, and promethazine. The one you'll probably buy at the store is Dimenhydrinate 50 mg.
If someone is working on a ship or a plane, they'll probably just get used to it. So there isn't any kind of long term treatment.
Posting this a reference for later use. I often have a hard time explaining to people what happens when my vestibular system is acting up. Been off-balance this week and freaking exhausted becasue my brain has been working overtime without me knowing it. I had to increase my VS therapy.
Vestibular System
Often referred to as our “sixth sense,” balance relies on input from several areas of the body to keep you from falling — the inner ear, the eyes, the muscles and joints in your leg and spine.
Have you ever wondered why you are able to stand upright or walk across a room without falling?
Well, your vestibular (balance) system has a lot to do with that.
This sensory system is different from all other senses in your body. Each of your other senses has only one input: You see with your eyes, smell with your nose, taste with your tongue, etc.
The vestibular system, however, has several sensory inputs: Balance organs of your inner ear (five on each side), visual inputs and inputs from the muscles and joints in your legs and spine. These inputs unite in the balance centers of the brain to give you a sense of balance. This forms a “sixth sense” as it sends information about head motion and orientation to the brain for processing in order to send the right commands to your different organs for performing daily life activities.
Embodiment seems to be the surest thing in the world, the one irrefutable fact. We think of ourselves as being in our bodies, and of our bodies as belonging to us, and us alone: thus we look out on the world with our own eyes, walk with our own legs, shake hands with our own hands. We have a sense, too, that consciousness is in our own head. It has long been assumed that the body image or body schema is a fixed and stable part of one’s awareness, perhaps in part hardwired, and largely sustained and affirmed by the continuing proprioceptive feedback from joint and muscle receptors regarding the position and movement of one’s limbs.
There was general astonishment, therefore, when Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen showed in 1998 that a rubber hand, under the right circumstances, could be mistaken for one’s own. If a subject’s real hand is hidden under a table while the rubber hand is visible before him, and both are stroked in synchrony, then the subject has the convincing illusion, even though he knows better, that the rubber hand is his — and that the sensation of being stroked is located in this inanimate though lifelike object. As I found when I looked through the “eyes” of a robot, knowledge in such a situation does nothing to dispel the illusion. The brain does its best to correlate all the senses, but the visual input here trumps the tactile.
Henrik Ehrsson, in Sweden, has developed a great range of such illusions, using the simplest equipment — video goggles, mannequins, and rubber arms. By disrupting the usual unity of touch, vision, and proprioception, he has induced uncanny experiences in some people, convincing them that their bodies have shrunk or grown enormous, even that they have swapped bodies with someone else. I experienced this for myself when I visited his laboratory in Stockholm for a number of experiments. In one, I was convinced that I possessed a third arm; in another, I felt embodied in a two-foot-high doll, and as I looked through “its” eyes via video goggles, normal objects in the room appeared enormous.
It is evident, from all of this work, that the brain’s representation of the body can often be fooled simply by scrambling the inputs from different senses. If sight and touch say one thing, however absurd, even a lifetime of proprioception and a stable body image cannot always resist this. (Individuals may be more or less susceptible to such illusions, and one might imagine that dancers or athletes, who have an exceptionally vivid sense of where their bodies are in space, may be harder to fool in this way.)
The body illusions Ehrsson is exploring are very much more than party tricks; they point to the ways in which our body ego, our sense of self, is formed from the coordination of senses — not just touch and vision but proprioception and perhaps vestibular sensation, too. Ehrsson and others favor the idea that there are “multisensory” neurons, perhaps at a number of places in the brain, which serve to coordinate the complex (and usually consistent) sensory information coming into the brain. But if this is interfered with — by nature or experiment — our seemingly unassailable certainties about the body and the self can vanish in an instant.
There are actually four destinations of the vestibular tracts.
The lesson got pretty boring so I had to spice up by illustrating the brain, the cerebellum, the brainstem. I assume it’s not only me who finds neuroanatomy challenging?
“i have sixth sense of some sorts” oh yeah? like you mean your vestibular system? proprioception? nociception? huh? do you want me to get started on your internal receptors? you are not special, you just lack knowledge about human senses
Since I’ve never heard other folks talk about this, I’m making my own information comic. I’ll include links to the pages I found here and here.
Edit: My friend shared another source with me! It’s kinda long and doesn’t have the most accessible language, but I’d say it’s worth a read!
[id: There are 7 images. The first is white with text that says “Brief Introduction to Vestibular Disorders”. The second is a traditional drawing of an ear diagram. There are arrows pointing to the semicircular canals and the vestibular nerve. It says “Vestibular disorders happen when there is some kind of damage done to your vestibular system. That’s the vestibular organs and the vestibular nerve in our ears and brain”. Underneath it says “*Drawn semi inaccurately to be able to fit everything on the page.” The next is two cartoony drawing of a person with shoulder length hair, glasses, and a hoodie. One of them has swirls for eyes and looks disoriented, and the other is winching and there are zig zag lines coming out of their ears. It says “The vestibular system is what controls our balance and eye movements. If this is damaged, your whole center of balance is thrown off. Often you feel like you’re moving when you’re not, unexplainably dizzy, experience intense vertigo, have trouble concentrating, tinnitus, and much more.” Third, the person is looking off to the left and is has a small dead inside smile. Next to them says “*internally screaming*, and below them says “No, seriously, there’s so much stuff that gets messed up because of this. And guess who experiences all the common symptoms.” The fourth is them holding up their right hand and talking, saying “It can be caused by things like age, disease, and injury. For me, it’s unknown if I was born like this or if all the ear infections I had as a kid caused permanent damage.” The fifth has a drawing of them falling, looking at the ground as they walk with their hood up, and leaning their head on their left hand. It says “I often fall down when I’m completely standing still, having to look down when I walk to make sure the ground is there, and hold my head up.” The last one is again a white image with text that says “There isn’t a lot of resources on vestibular disorders, but a good place to start is WebMD and Vestibular Disorders Association. If you have any suggestions for resources, please tell me. Please. You have no idea how happy that would make me.” End id]
