News Brief: Kathleen Cullen’s expertise on balance featured in The Washington Post

Raj and Neera Sing Professor of Biomedical Engineering Kathleen Cullen’s research was featured in an article that appeared in The Washington Post recently about how Olympic gymnasts maintain their balance.

The article, titled “How Olympians – and the rest of us – stay balanced and upright,” shares insights from Cullen’s research on the vestibular system to explain how Olympians, as well as the average person, maintain balance. For American gymnast “Simone Biles perfecting something on the beam or on the mat, any sort of in-the-moment correction would be done with vestibular and proprioceptive feedback,” Cullen said in the article. “Everything else, including vision, is just too slow.”

The same is true for everyday motions such as walking across the room, she said.

The brain integrates sensory input from the vestibular and proprioceptive systems, which provide information about the position and movement of our bodies in space, and compares this input to past experiences. Through practice, athletes can build sophisticated internal models of their movements that become automatic.

Cullen suggested activities such as tai chi, yoga, and dancing as means to strengthen the vestibular and proprioceptive systems as we age.

“The good news is that the brain is incredibly plastic,” Cullen said. “All this power is there to be harnessed, and you won’t harness that unless you move.”

Cullen’s research focuses on understanding how vestibular information is encoded and integrated with other information in the brain to ensure accurate perception and control of body posture and gaze. Recent work in her lab revealed how the cerebellum transforms sensory information into an estimate of body motion required for postural control, and how the brain computes internal models of voluntary movement. Click here to learn more about Cullen and her research.