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Vestibular system
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The vestibular system is the machinery the body uses to know how it is positioned and to keep from falling over. It is made up of inner ear structures and nerve pathways that reach the brain, and with them it supports balance and proprioception, the sense of where your own body is.
What it detects is the orientation of the head and its acceleration in any direction: it works like a carpenter's bubble level, which tells you which way something is tilted and when it moves. And it does not stop at detecting: it compensates. If the head moves, the system adjusts the eyes and posture to compensate. Those two adjustments have names: the vestibulo-ocular reflex and the vestibulospinal reflex.
Its peripheral part, the one in the inner ear, is called the vestibular apparatus and it has well defined pieces: the utricle, the saccule and three semicircular ducts. Inside them is the tissue that does the reading: the macula in the utricle and the saccule, and the crista ampullaris in the semicircular ducts.
In brief
The vestibular system is a set of structures and neural pathways that supports the sense of proprioception and balance.
It registers the orientation and acceleration of the head in any direction and compensates with the eyes and posture, through the vestibulo-ocular and vestibulospinal reflexes.
Its apparatus in the inner ear is made up of the utricle, the saccule and three semicircular ducts, with the macula and the crista ampullaris as sensory epithelia.
Sources (1)
- National Center for Biotechnology Information, StatPearls PublishingPhysiology, Vestibular System, StatPearlsPublished
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