Glenna Mary Smith, age 15, of Lancaster, PA

How do, we balance?

You don't have to see the ground coming closer to know you are falling, Even with your eyes closed, you straighten up again when a car ride tips you sideways. When you trip over a rug, you fling out your arms and shift weight without even stopping to think, All this is balancing. You could not do it as a baby. You learned to balance as you learned to walk.

The job of balancing is done by the ears, but not by those two pink shells on either side of your head, They are merely the outer ears, They cannot even hear.  Their job is to catch and concentrate sound waves into the hearing part of the ear inside the head, They have nothing whatever to do with helping you to balance.

This is done in the delicate inner ear which is buried deep inside the bony skull. The balancing organ is a complicated arrangement of caves and tunnels, The main chamber is called the vestibule. Balancing is done by this vestibule with the help of three little tunnel.  Each leaves the vestibule and returns to it after having made a half circle. Hence they are called the semicircular canals of the inner ear.

The vestibule and the semicircular canals are partly filled with watery liquid. All the walls are lined with very sensitive nerve endings, These nerves can tell wet from dry in a jiffy. Being nerves, they act like telephone wires. They flash any unusual information to the proper switchboard in the brain.

This important news concerns the level of the liquid in the canals. This liquid tips around as you move your head. Its surface, like the surface of all liquids, tries to stay level with the surface of the ground. As your head tips, the liquid in the inner ear rises up along certain walls and drops down along others. The sensitive nerve endings` register this information before you know about it.

Sometimes this news rates top priority in the brain:;. For one of its top prority is to protect your body from harm. Sometimes there is no time to before taking action. A serious loss of balance is one of those times, Then the brain flashes out emergency messages, Muscles move and the weight often gets shifted in time to save you from a tumble.

The semicircular canals are placed to keep a check o n what happens in all directions, Some of the sensitive nerves report when you are falling forward, some when you are falling backwards. Still others report when you tip to one side or the other, The brain knows exactly what to do about these messages in a jiffy. Even if the weight is not shifted to prevent a fall you are saved from some of the damage the brain is in constant contact with the balancing organs. They work together to keep you standing straight, sitting comfortably walking, running jumping or dancing, Your sense of balance keeps you comfortable even when you are lying down, The brain learned what to do about all this in a hurry, if necessary while you were learning to walk. So all those early falls and to were needed to keep us from toppling over every other moment through the rest of our lives.