Humans Born with Sense of Gravity |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Thursday, 28 April 2005 16:57 |
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After observing how poorly astronauts are at predicting how objects will move in zero gravity, Francesco Lacquaniti at the Santa Lucia Foundation and the University of Rome, and his colleagues hypothesized that we might have an internal model of gravity in our brains, which helps us understand how gravity will affect the movement of objects. Using brain imaging, they found that the brains gravity center is in the vestibular cortex, which handles information from the inner ears balance organs. The vestibular cortex lit up when subjects saw objects moving normally under the influence of gravity, but was much less active when unnatural movements were observed. This implies that the vestibular cortex is responding to gravity, rather than just movement. Lacquaniti says that rather than mentally running through thousands of possible types of motions, the vestibular cortex sets up an internal gravity model, which provides a more efficient way of predicting an object's motion. He believes that links to the balance organs may help calibrate this model.
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