Vestibular-Ocular Reflex Is More Sophisticated Than Previously
Believed Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Our brains are capable of doing some amazing things. Yet, there
are some processes which, while sophisticated enough, are mostly
thought of as common and basic. For instance: The reflex which
allows us to keep our eyes focused on one point while our heads
are moving about. This reflex is called the Vestibular-Ocular
Reflex (or VOR), and we share it with most vertebrates. For many
years, scientists have believed that this reflex is controlled
in the lower brainstem as a low-level process without much
sophistication. Now, researchers from at the Imperial College in
London are challenging this notion, suggesting that this reflex
is controlled by higher-level functions, such as those which
determine handedness. This research has resulted in a paper
which has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience. To
better understand where this VOR process takes place, Qadeer
Arshad and his collea