Martha Capreol wrote:

> Hi Nathalie,
> How about a basic physiotherapy exercise for retraining proprioception. 1)
> With eyes open, students can stand on one leg and slowly bend down and up a
> number of times (relatively easy to keep your balance as you are helped by
> your visual system, etc) 2) Do the same thing with your eyes closed (can be
> very difficult to keep balance as you are relying mostly on your
> proprioception.

Martha and Nathalie,

My mentor, who specialized in perceptual psychology said you always want to be
very careful doing activities like this.  He suggested that you will always
find a few people who have a dysfunctional vestibular mechanism who will fall
flat on their face in exercises such as this (can be seriously hurt).  Standing
upright required the operation of two of the three systems involved ( vision,
vestibular and muscle sense).   Since people without vestibular sense can do
most things without it they aren't aware that they are missing this sense.  The
way they find out about this is to try and do a task with eyes closed.  Be sure
to have people spotting around the person who you are doing this with.  We used
to do such a task and found one in every hundred or so had some problem with
it.  That was way above the rate he predicted but taught us top be very very
careful when doing this kind of activity.

Bob Grossman
Kalamazoo College
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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