Understanding how your body senses muscle movement is essential for balance.
Katherine Wilkinson, professor of biology at San Jose State University, examines how it works.
Katherine Wilkinson is a Professor of biology at San José State University in San Jose, California. Wilkinson’s specialty is studying and understanding proprioception–how our brains understand our physical presence in the world–a complex sensory system related to balance and coordination.
Proprioception
In school one of the first things you learn is you have five senses. You have more than that. One is often called the sixth sense—but it’s not what you might think…
This sixth sense is called “proprioception.”
Proprioception is a complex sensory system critical for balance and coordination. One way to understand this is to consider that someone whose proprioception is impaired will have difficulty with simple movements like walking, because they won’t know where their legs are without looking directly at them.
Proprioception relies on our muscles for sensory information, specifically muscle spindles. These are really tiny structures in your muscles that respond to movement. Your brain can take all of these signals from all of your muscles and that gives you a sense of where you are in space.
This muscle information is very important, and if you lose it, you’re in trouble.
What we are interested in in my lab is really understanding how the muscle spindle works. At a basic level the muscle spindle talks in a simple frequency code. But, we want to know how you go from your muscle stretching to an action potential, because there are a lot of different molecular players along the way.
My research is focused on figuring out what all of those are–because if you understand how something works you may be able to help fix it when it stops working.
It’s well known that as people age their proprioception worsens, which can lead to falls and injuries.
I hope that my research can lead to new ways to improve this decline and, therefore, reduce the rates of falling and injuries. Ultimately, this work could also lead to a better understanding of how to improve the proprioception of people facing neuromuscular diseases, aging and obesity.
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[SJSU] – SJSU Experts: Katherine Wilkinson
