The vestibular organs in the inner ear—tiny motion sensors—send signals that let people keep their balance, track objects with their eyes, and walk without falling. But researchers have struggled to study these signals in isolation, because any movement or sound also activates other senses, muddying the results. This team has developed a way to stimulate the vestibular system non-invasively in humans, without disturbing other senses. They plan to use this technique to map how the brain transforms vestibular signals into different types of movement—controlling the eyes, maintaining posture, and guiding voluntary actions. They will then test how these mechanisms break down in patients who have had a stroke affecting the parietal cortex, or who have a genetic disorder that damages the cerebellum. In healthy volunteers, they will temporarily disrupt parietal cortex function with brain stimulation to mimic these deficits. This is fundamental science. It will not produce a new treatment or device tomorrow. But understanding how the brain turns inner-ear signals into coordinated movement is essential for diagnosing and rehabilitating balance disorders, dizziness, and falls—common and disabling consequences of stroke and neurological disease.
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The vestibular organs in the inner ear provide the brain with important sensory information for many motor and perceptual functions. In the past, research into understanding these mechanisms has been hampered by the inability to selectively stimulate the vestibular system without affecting other sensory systems or affecting the behaviour of interest. In recent years we have pioneered vestibular stimulation techniques that allow us to do this non-invasively in human subjects. We plan to develop these techniques further and use them to investigate some specific mechanisms in the brain that are necessary for using vestibular information to control different types of motor behaviour. Such mechanisms are vital but not very much is known about them. We plan to investigate these mechanisms in human subjects and try to understand how they work, which parts of the brain are involved, and how they are affected by neurological disease to produce functional deficits. First, we will use our vestibular stimulation techniques to develop ways of probing these mechanisms associated with the different motor systems that control the eyes, balance, or voluntary movement. We shall then use this information to study how the mechanisms break down in specific neurological diseases. To do this we will study patients who have had a stroke affecting the parietal cortex, or who have a genetic disease that disrupts the cerebellum. We shall also use a brain stimulation technique to disrupt the normal function of the parietal cortex in healthy subjects. These investigations will tell us about the roles played by these specific parts of the brain in the mechanisms, whether these brain areas control vestibular input to all motor systems equally, and the resulting functional deficits caused by stroke and cerebellar disease.
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