vestibular sense

The vestibular sense is the sense of balance.

But the utricle is not all there is to the vestibular sense.

The utricle and attendant structures are concerned with the vestibular sense, and I leave them to one side for now.

The vestibular sense made possible by the utricle is somewhat reminiscent of the proprioceptive senses (see p. 221).

The mechanoreceptors are hair cells, the same mechanoreceptors for vestibular sense and hearing.

The bus lurches violently, but he moves with it; his junky's vestibular sense tuned in, like radar, to every bump and bend of the A1.

Increased muscle tone, development of the proprioceptive and vestibular senses and opportunities to practice with balance are all consequences of this reflex.

The fish developed the third canal for the up-down dimension as well, and all vertebrates since - including ourselves, of course - have had a three-dimensional vestibular sense.

Other sensory modalities exist, for example the vestibular sense (balance and the sense of movement) and proprioception (the sense of knowing one's position in space).

The utricle and its outgrowths remain concerned with the vestibular sense in all higher vertebrates, too, including man, and I shall describe this later in the chapter.

For all vertebrates, from the fish upward, these little organs in the vestibule represented a sense organ governing orientation in space, something which may be referred to as the vestibular sense.

Balance, equilibrioception, or vestibular sense is the sense that allows an organism to sense body movement, direction, and acceleration, and to attain and maintain postural equilibrium and balance.

THE VESTIBULAR SENSE The acoustic nerve, which leads from the cochlea, has a branch leading to the other half of the contents of the internal ear, the utricle and its outgrowths, introduced on page 248.

However, where the proprioceptive senses tell us the position of one part of the body with relation to another, the vestibular sense tells us the position of the body as a whole with respect to its environment, especially with regard to the direction of the pull of gravity.