While waiting for several hours till midnight at the Harry Potter party we were at last Friday, I noticed a book in Barnes and Noble's Science/Medicine section that looked kind of interesting, so I picked it up and... and found myself, by the time our turn on line came, something like a hundred pages into it and determined to buy and finish it. It's called Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense, by Scott McCredie, and is basically about the vistibular neuroanatomical system that regulates our awareness of being in (or off) balance. This is of course something that as MAists we're particularly interested in for practical reasons—most kicking practiced in the air is all about balance, after all—but McCredie has much larger fish to fry. He presents a really detailed, convincing set of arguments that balance is a sense, in the same way that vision and hearing are, by all standard criteria; and even more important, he surveys a lot of very active research work now in progess that shows that vestibular integrity is a component of cognitive tasks, like the aquisition of normal reading ability, and the ability to plan sequences of action, that have never previously been connected with this aspect of our kinæsthetic competence. A variety of evidence appears to support the idea that balance is not simply the sensory analogue of what happens when you move a carpenter's level at different angles, but rather corresponds to a computational capacity within the cortex, just as visual and auditory processing do—that it is, in other words, a higher-order function, and one which is implicated in other higher order functions; so, for example, there seems to be some connection between dyslexia and impared balance capability, and improvement in the latter seems in many cases to seriously improve dyslexics' reading ability. There's a lot more stuff, on a really wide variety of seemingly disparte topics, that flow together quite seamlessly around the central issue of the workings and impact of this apparently least-known sense. Outstanding book, I think—even has some very helpful, practical suggestions on how to evaluate and improve ones' own sense of balance... check out the description and reviews at Amazon or elsewhere, this might be something you would find useful and informative.
