The vestibular system, located in the inner ear, is a crucial sensory mechanism that detects motion and orientation relative to gravity, enabling rapid motor responses for balance and stable vision.
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my name is Steve Lewis burger I'm
neuroscientist I'm the chair of the
Department of Neurobiology at Duke
University the vestibular system is a
set of sensors inside our ear near were
we in in in the temporal bone and they
are exquisitely sensitive to our motion
through space and our position with
respect to gravity so if I tilt my head
this way those sensors indicate that my
head is tilted to the left if I turn my
head like that those sensors indicate
that I turned my head to the right it's
important for us to be exquisitely aware
of our position in space and if you
think about if you slip on the ice or
trip over a step when you're climbing
the very first thing that happens is you
put out your hand to try to prevent
yourself from falling and hitting your
face and that's driven by the vestibular
system it's sensitive to when you start
to fall and it immediately with very
after very short times on the orders of
fractions of a second it causes your
motor system to take actions that will
rescue you from serious damage the
primary sensory cell is a hair cell and
it basically is a cell that has little
cilia sticking out of it and the way it
works is that if the cilia Bend then the
electrical potential of the cell changes
and that creates that that transforms a
mechanical signal into an electrical
signal and the electrical signals are
the currency of the brain now different
parts of the vestibular system use those
hair cells in different ways and so
there's a simple mechanical system
that's a tube like a doughnut and it has
the hair is sticking out into it so that
when you turn the tube the hairs this
fluid inside that tube deflects the
hairs and so that's how we're sensitive
to our head turns and then the other two
organs are quote their two organs called
the otolith organs
they basically have the hair sticking
out into a rock and if I tilt my head
back like that the rock slides back it
pulls on the hairs and it takes a
mechanical event turns it into an
electrical signal so that the brain can
we know that motion sickness is caused
when where your vestibular system is
telling your brain is different from
what your visual system is telling your
brain we do not know exactly how that
works and we don't even know why we
would have motion sickness there are
some just-so stories we do know that the
middle midline of the stimulus
cerebellum is important for motion
sickness but I guess I would point out
that I get motion sick when I'm on a
boat and when you're on a boat and
you're in the waves and you're rolling
back and forth very slowly that seems to
be the kind of stimulus that when it
doesn't match with what you're seeing
creates the sensation of motion sickness
and nausea and you think about our
astronauts it was not widely publicized
but our astronauts were motion sick for
the first at least three to five days
that they were in orbit because without
gravity the system that senses where
gravity is and your head position in
space no longer functions and so they
had completely lost that part of the
vestibular input that tells them whether
they're tilting their head or whether
they're looking whether whether whether
you know that's down or that's down and
so there's a complete loss of the
matching of what they're seeing and what
they're feeling from their their
vestibular system so they were they were
vertigo is when your vestibular system
isn't is giving you a wrong signal and
so it's telling you that you're moving
when you're not and so you might get the
sensation that you're just turning
around in a circle or you might get the
sensation that you're falling this way
and that comes from you know a part of
the vestibular system being broken [Music]
it's an incredibly simple reflex
behavior that is really important to us
and many animals so the job of the
visual system is to process images so
that you can see what's happening and if
images slip of move a little bit and the
eye doesn't move to track them then they
slip across the retina and we're not
capable of processing and processing
them with nearly the same acuity and so
the vestibular ocular reflex is a reflex
that uses our head turns to guide our
movements and if I turn my head back and
forth like this my eyes keep looking
directly at you and that's that would
happen if I had closed my eyes and we're
in the dark
that's the vestibular ocular reflex
making sure that my eyes remain sort of
like gyroscopically stabilized so that
even as I move my head around the place
I'm looking is nice and stable and so
the images that are coming from the
external world don't slip across my
retina and I have a good vision
I'm Steeve less burger and I'm a neuroscientist
you [Music]
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