Talk:Vestibular system
Actually, I do not want to become a writer of scholarpedia articles, rather I want to comment on the above mentioned article.
(1) I think that any reader who is not familiar with biological issues would first like to get some notion of the function of this organ. This you learn mainly from behavioral and clinical studies, rather than from an article such as the one above that is mainly related to neural activity in the brain. (2) The article is biased towards vestibulo-oculomotor functions. But this view is not even complete. Normally, vision is governing gaze stabilisation in the low- to mid-frequency range of head movements, with vestibular contribtions contributing at high frequencies (>0.8 Hz). Apart from vestibulo-oculomotor function, research has clearly demonstrated other vestibular functions, such as important contributions to postural control and spatial orientation (also to vegetative functions). These should be considered in more detail. (3) The article, being biased towards neuron recording findings in animals, reflects in my eyes the neurophysiological credo of the second half of the 20th century: “By ‘reading’ the neural activity patterns of brain neurons we will understand the brain and its sensory organs.” This did not work, because we do not know the “neural code” and because we have difficulties in understanding information processing in the brain’s neural nets with their ‘distributed processing’ and ‘overlapping stimulus dimension coding’ properties. I think we should make clear when certain aspects are not well understood. The list at the end, Future directions, is pointing in the same (wrong) direction.
Vestibular System (comment)
Actually, I do not want to become a writer of scholarpedia articles, rather I want to comment on the above mentioned article.
(1) I think that any reader who is not familiar with biological issues would first like to get some notion of the function of this organ. This you learn mainly from behavioral and clinical studies, rather than from an article such as the one above that is mainly related to neural activity in the brain. (2) The article is biased towards vestibulo-oculomotor functions. But this view is not even complete. Normally, vision is governing gaze stabilisation in the low- to mid-frequency range of head movements, with vestibular contribtions at high frequencies (>0.8 Hz). Apart from vestibulo-oculomotor function, research has clearly demonstrated other vestibular functions, such as important contributions to postural control and spatial orientation (also to vegetative functions). These should be considered in more detail. (3) The article, being biased towards neuron recording findings in animals, reflects in my eyes the neurophysiological credo of the second half of the 20th century: “By ‘reading’ the neural activity patterns of brain neurons we will understand the brain and its sensory organs.” This did not work, because we do not know the “neural code” and because we have difficulties in understanding information processing in the brain’s neural nets with their ‘distributed processing’ and ‘overlapping stimulus dimension coding’ properties. I think we should make clear when certain aspects are not well understood. The list at the end, Future directions, is pointing in the same (wrong) direction.
