Mapping out your world: your body keeps position.
As Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, M.D. from Yahoo Health points out, the body has a built in circadian rhythm that lets you know when it is morning and when it is evening. The body also uses this circadian rhythm to know when to make morning hormones or evening hormones important for various body processes. If you try to push your body too hard to trick the circadian cycles, you can fatigue your adrenals from over stress. Adrenal Fatigue
Just like the body has an internal clock, it also has a built in coordinates system. I like to call it my internal gyroscope. Dr. DiNubile calls it the body’s internal GPS.
I’ve always been proud of my internal gyroscope. I pride myself on knowing which way is north, and which way is south. Apparently, it doesn’t matter if I’m in a building with no windows, or if I’m in the dark of night. I know my way around. I might get lost when driving on country roads that don’t connect to my destination, but I always know how far off course I get if I do take the wrong road.
The other day I was driving around south Sebastopol with Kristina to take our dance lessons. I knew exactly where we were in relation to where we needed to be, but I took the wrong road. I remember driving along this wrong road, in a hurry, and telling Kristina, “We need to be exactly down that hill.” But, we had to back track on the road that we were on to get there.
How does the body know where you are in space? Let’s review; the body has five or so senses. Sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Oh, and pain; you feel pain, right? Oh, wait a minute there one more sense that the body detects that they don’t teach you in kindergarten. The missing sense is largely unconscious, and it’s called proprioception.
Proprioception comes from special touch sensors called mechanoreceptors. Some mechanoreceptors give information about pain (try bending your finger backwards and see if you eventually feel pain), and some mechanoreceptors give information about proprioception. These are called proprioceptors, a special kind of mechanoreceptor. When I teach seniors at Bennett Valley Senior Center about balance and fall prevention, I try, in vain to teach them the word proprioceptor. Just like you, the word proprioceptor goes in one ear and out the other. My approach is to keep using the word proprioceptor over and over. Is it working yet?
Now, the body has millions of proprioceptors built deep within the muscles, every muscle of the body. These mechanoreceptors called proprioceptors deep in the muscles are called muscle spindles and golgi tendon organs. The muscle spindles are in the belly of the muscles and the golgi tendon organs are in the part of the muscle that attaches to the tendon at the ends of the muscle.
I feel like I’m teaching physiology class here.
The receptors in the muscles that give information about where you are in space, proprioceptors, AKA muscle spindles and golgi tendon organs, tell you what the length of the muscle is, how fast it is moving, and how much tension there is in the muscles.
You’re not thinking about it right now, but the proprioceptors in your muscles are telling you where your arm is in space. The pro-pri-o-receptors know you are not moving very much right now, and they are telling you, “This doesn’t feel good to just sit around right now, let’s get outside and move around because we’re not feeding the joints very much lubricating fluid, and I can feel them congeal.” Or something like that.
These proprioceptors also protect the muscle when you are lifting a dumbbell at Fusion Fitness that is far too heavy for your little bicep. When tension is too much, the reflex from the receptor sends a reflex to the spine to shut the muscle down faster than Hell’s Kitchen.
Your body not only has millions of proprioceptors built into the muscles, but it also has millions of proprioceptors built into the joints of the body. The knuckles, the knee, the jaw; it doesn’t matter, you have movement proprioceptors active in every joint of the body. These proprioceptors get a lot of information about gravitational forces, and they tell you a lot about what your current joint angle is. Is the elbow fully flexed, or is it extended, reaching out for something?
The information coming from the muscle and joint proprioceptors travels from the muscle or joint to the spinal cord. That information then gets relayed to the brainstem, cerebellum, or a relay station called the thalamus deep in the brain to further distribute the information. From there, don’t ask me how, the information gets passed around the brain to see where in Sebastopol you are, and how you can safely make it back to your chiropractor in Santa Rosa.
When you ask someone where information from balance comes from, they raise their hand with alacrity and volunteer, “the inner ear,” or, “the eyes.” The canals of the inner ears deep within the skull have fluid that swishes around when you move your head. The fluid in the canals trigger off another set of proprioceptors to relay the information that is coordinated in the brain stem with the information from the eyes, the muscles, the joints, and the rest of the brain.
The inner ear and the eyes are both very important for balance and movement and your inner coordination system, but since I’m a chiropractor, and I don’t treat eye disorders, and I rarely treat inner ear problems like “canalithiasis,” I’m going to talk about something else very near and dear to you that you aren’t thinking too much about. (Or, “…about which you are not thinking.”)
As important the inner ear and good eyesight are for balance and locking in precise coordination for fine motor control, it is not well known just how important the spine is for balance.
As I tell my seniors interested in fall prevention, “the spine is the largest balance organ in the body.” If you popped an eyeball out into your hand, and you spread out the retina so it lays flat on your palm, you would notice with your good eye that it really doesn’t cover much surface area. Compare that small surface with how much hypothetical surface is covered by all of your muscles spread out thin. Remember, the muscles in your body make up 75% of your body’s volume.
Just as importantly, though, is the density of the receptors in a muscle or joint. I’ve heard it said that 90% of the information coming into the brain comes from movement, and is largely unconscious. And, 90% of that 90% comes from the joints and muscles of the spine. Even though you have massive thigh muscles, the population of proprioceptors is very low per square inch. The density of proprioceptors in the low back is 10 times the density of the thigh. The density of Santa Rosa is 10 times the density of southwest Sebastopol. The density of San Francisco is 2-3 times the density of Santa Rosa. The upper spine has 10 times the density of the lower spine. That’s 100 times the density of the thigh.
Do you see how important the spine is for brain input? When you dissect the brainstem, you can see the big, thick cords that relay information from the spine to the brain, and they dwarf all other nerve highways. The spine is the most important brain booster that we have. With more information going to the brain from the spine, the brain is boosted, elevated to a different state of awareness. The part of the brainstem called the reticular activating system that keeps you awake and aware is more active. The information going to the brain’s relay station, the thalamus, helps to boost the entire brain to bolster your thinking, and to help you understand this blog entry.
More spine movement helps you think better, you pedantic erudite, you. It also helps you have a solid GPS system that will keep you the hell out of Sebastopol.