Abstract
The sense of balance, which is usually barely noticeable in the background of each of our movements, only becomes manifest in its function during intense stimulation or in the event of illness, which may quite literally turn your world upside down. While it is true that balance is becoming a bigger issue, that is mainly because people are losing it more frequently. So why is balance not as commonly talked about in psychology, medicine or the arts as the other five traditional senses? This is partly due to its unusual multi-modal nature, whereby three sensory inputs are coordinated and integrated by the central nervous system. Without it, however, we might not have much use for the other senses. The sense of balance encompasses the bodily experience in its entirety. Not only do we act with the body, we may also think and feel through it and with it. Bodily states are not simply effects of cognition; they cause it as well. Equilibrioception is an essential sense and it is interconnected with a wide range of other areas, including cognition, perception, embodiment, the autonomic nervous system, aesthetics, the arts, and education.
Highlights
The sense of balance, which is usually barely noticeable in the background of each of our movements, only becomes manifest in its function during intense stimulation or in the event of illness, which may quite literally turn your world upside down
Despite the growing literature on balance, what the present opinion piece aims to illustrate is that the actual sense of balance is still underrated compared to the other traditional senses and given that it is an essential foundation for numerous physical and cultural phenomena
One of the reasons for this underestimation is that its main sensory input, the vestibular apparatus, is arguably the most mysterious sensory organ in the body: (1) It acts unobtrusively; among the sensory systems, the equilibrium system is the one that is least consciously perceived under physiological conditions [7,8]. (2) How the relating information is processed, and in which functional circuits it is integrated, is not yet fully explored [9,10]
Summary
One of the reasons that Hillary Clinton lost her staggering two-digit lead over Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election was that she was repeatedly seen staggering in public [1]. Her stumbling was apparently conceived by millions as a sign of weakness, of unreliability. Just how important physical balance is for people can be seen in the ubiquity of the talk of “balance”. You won’t understand perception by merely exploring the sense organs. Trying to understand static and dynamic balance by studying the individual sensory organs is like trying to understand a traffic jam by looking inside the internal combustion engines
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