Breathe In, Breathe Out

Athletic Balance Help from Technology

Balance is an indispensable ingredient of athletic success, in almost any sport you might think of. Technology can help athletes sharpen their balancing skills with wearable devices.

In Brain Maps: Not Always Accurate I told the story of a golfer who was tilting her head without realizing she was doing so, messing up her sense of orientation and the flight path of her shots.

A slight but unrealized head tilt can cause other problems, too. That is, balance problems. And for any athlete hoping to compete on a high level, compromised balance is not something to ignore.

I had worked with the golfer using the Feldenkrais Method to develop the awareness needed to sense and then do something about the unrealized head tilt. And the same could be done with many kinds of balance issues.

Unfortunately, not everyone has a Feldenkrais Method practitioner available. And, more unfortunately, not everyone would be willing to put in the time, effort and money needed to develop a sharpened ability to sense the body state accurately and then be learn how to do something about it.

But technology may be riding to the rescue of athletes who want to sharpen their balance. These technological rescuer comes in the form of devices that athletes can wear to help them sense balance.

Two such devices are the Ultimate Balance Trainer and a new device that resembles a behind the ear style of hearing aid. It's called the e-AR for ear-worn activity recognition. Both devices provide balance information by the clever use of accelerometer devices.

Ultimate Balance could probably be used in many situations demanding real time balance feedback. But it's marketed as a tennis training aid. The basic assumption is that if your head is tilted off the vertical axis enough, then you're off balance. And that's not good if you're trying to hit the ball forcefully and with enough recovery time to get ready for the next volley.

Players using the Ultimate Balance Trainer wear the device on one side of the head; it's mounted on either a hat or headband. When it detects a tilt forward, backward, right, left, or some combination of these, a synthesized voice informs the wearer of the exact form of deviation.

The e-AR hearing aid-like device works a little differently. By sitting high up on the body in an area without much muscle tissue to absorb force, It senses shockwaves through the skeleton. And it doesn't communicate with the wearer directly. Instead, the e-AR sends signals wirelessly to a computer or PDA for further processing. A video demonstration is here.

These things make you wonder what may be coming next. That might be a premature thought, however. One critic of the e-AR thinks it might not be up to the task of providing accurate information.

Bill Harris, a biologist and amateur ice hockey coach at the University of Cambridge, UK, questions whether the skeleton could transmit enough detailed information to help suggest major improvements in performance. "A device above the ear wouldn’t track nearly enough information," he claims.

It's not hard to imagine that we'll be seeing many more of these sorts of devices. They'll get smaller and more powerful, just like all the other electronic stuff in our current and future lives.

"The trick was to integrate wireless communication with high bandwidth and low power," says (e-AR developer Guang-Zhong) Yang.

And it's not just athletes that will benefit. Accurate balance information can help people in rehab, the elderly, disabled, and all the rest of us.

Balance can be a bad thing to have too little of. It's great that technology can help.

Brain Maps: Not Always Accurate

It's the Things You Don't Know...

I once worked with a professional athlete with an unusual problem. Not a serious injury-related problem, mind you, but one serious enough to limit athletic performance. .

Simply put, this golfer suddenly found it difficult to hit the ball where she was aiming. That's pretty much true all the time for a duffer like me, but for a pro, it's not so cool

As we worked together, it became apparent that she was tilting her head slightly to one side. But she didn't realize it. The tilt wasn't pronounced and most people wouldn't notice it. But for someone needing precision aim and alignment, it was troublesome.

As we worked during a Feldenkrais Method lesson, the head tilting was revealed clearly to her. Once she was able to sense the tilt herself, she was able to use her athletic abilities to incorporate that fact into her movements. The wayward aim became a thing of the past very soon.

Body Schema Out of Wack

It would be tempting to explain the head tilt as a structural problem in need of adjustment. But the problem wasn't so much that she was tilting her head, or that the tilt produced a series of consequences in her skeleton.

The problem was one related to her body schema, the body maps in the brain that represent how we're sensing and moving ourselves. I've been writing a series of posts about the body schema, and this story fits in with it.

As miraculous as these brain maps are at giving humans a sense of embodiment and the ability to use it to sense and move around the environment, sometimes things get twisted around. In one sense, a tilted head sensed as straight is an athletic problem. But looked at another way, it's an illusion, a trick . Trouble is, it's a trick the head's owner isn't in on.

There are plenty of kinesthetic illusions that come from inaccurate brain maps. Some are funny parlor tricks, while others are very serious indeed.

i-eclectica.org gives some examples of both kinds, even offering a YouTube demo of one of the most famous, the rubber hand illusion:

If you'd like to experience this sort of kinesthetic illusion yourself, try this from the post:

I do remember the crossed-hands illusion: holding my arms out in front of me and crossing them over, rotating my hands so my palms face each other, then meshing my fingers together, and slowly rotating my hands up between my arms so I’m looking at my knuckles. Then either asking someone to point to one of my middle or ring fingers or to touch on of them with the tip of my nose and attempt to move it. It is rather hard not to move the wrong one or, in other words, to avoid minor failure of my body schema.

All Will Be Revealed

So what can explain such illusions? In the crossed hands example above, it's pretty simple. We've all looked at our right and left hands millions of times as they reside on their proper sides of our bodies. But in the crossed hands illusion, things get reversed. And not being used to seeing things reversed, the brain gets confused. You think you're moving a finger on one hand when it's actually on the other.

The rubber hand gets placed in a position where it could belong to you. Then the simultaneous stroking combines with the visual sense to produce a kinesthetic illusion. There's even an illusion that leaves you feeling you nose growing longer, as you're touching it, ala Pinocchio.

But Seriously

Those are fun, but illusions connected to the body schema can also be very serious. There are some described at length in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. Body Dysmorphic Disorder and phantom limb phenomena are two of them. (There's even a clearly written book: Phantoms in the Brain)

Even anorexia, usually described as an eating disorder, owes its persistent illusion of the body never feeing slim enough to body schema. For much more on that see The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.

Clearly, we need much more research into how this body schema stuff works, gets out of wack and how we can work with it. In the meantime, though, developing a keener awareness of how we sense and act is a good way to work with many such body schema-based inaccuracies.

After all, you want to hit the ball straight, don't you?

Brain Maps: Your Body Extends Farther Than You Think

Peripersonal Space

Remember telling scary stories around the campfire or at home? One of the ones that scared me most was about a guy who chopped people up. When they found this fellow, it turned out he had hatchets where his hands were supposed to be.

Or did you ever see the movie Edward Scissorhands? Johnny Depp plays the title character who has ornate and elaborate sets of scissors instead of hands.

There aren’t really people with hatchets or scissors in place of their hands. But, fantasy aside, there might as well be. The human brain can and does incorporate all sorts of tools and implements into the body schema, at least according to recent and well-documented research on the body schema. (The body schema, which I wrote about earlier, is the image of the body stored in multiple parts of the brain.)

The explanation of extending the body's parts with tools, implements or just the space around you, is something called peripersonal space — the bubble of space around a person’s body that his brain includes as part of him in its map of the body, according to The Body Has A Mind of Its Own.

Turns out your brain thinks (no pun intended) that the space around you is part of you, and that it’s pretty much up for grabs by you.

How Do We Know?

So, how do we know all this?

Japanese researcher Atsushi Iriki probed monkeys’ brains to identify single cells that responded to what the hand was touching, as well as the visual space around that hand. Then Iriki did something clever by training the monkeys to use a rake to obtain food. After three weeks, Iriki remapped the monkey brain. He found that the previously identified hand and visual space cells now included the rake. That is, the rake might as well be attached to the monkey as far as the monkey’s brain was concerned. And when the monkey no longer used the rake to feed himself, the body schema shrank to its normal size.

I’ve always been kind of interested in this sort of thing as a Feldenkrais Method practitioner. Body maps play a gigantic role in the Feldenkrais experience, and it’s not a great leap to expend the map idea to objects, implements or tools that might be connected to your body as you go about your daily activities.

Philosopher Andy Clark has written about this sort of thing, and I’ve written about him before. I recommend his book Natural-Born Cyborgs. Clark has also been interviewed about the subject:

He agreed it was possible, following up with this faintly unnerving summary that uses Rudy Rucker's term for the human nervous system part of a cyborg. “Any technology that operates robustly and continuously,” he said, “can be factored in by the rest of the mind so as to become as much a part of us as non-consciously operating wetware.”

The Space Can Be Virtual

Even more fascinating, you probably don’t even have to be in “real” space to use the peripersonal touch to incorporate stuff into your body schema. One article quotes Iriki on this:

These neurons may constitute the neural basis of a person's feeling a sense of reality when playing video games, Dr. Iriki said. People say they can feel the joystick touching objects in the monitor as they extend their bodies into far space.

Other experiments at the Human Technology Laboratories at the University of Padova take the concept of peripersonal space into virtual reality. They found the concept holds in the virtual space as well as the real space.

Representations of perceived Peripersonal space (the portion of space is represented by the particles surrounding the dummy) with (on the left) and without (on the right) tool manipulation. Image from HT Labs

Practical Matters

These research-related ideas are fascinating, but is this idea of peripersonal space something that we can use in a practical sense?

It’s not hard to imagine how it could be applied in a rehab setting. Prosthetic limbs are getting more and more sophisticated and useful all the time. The future probably holds some pretty amazing haptic-based tools and strategies for rehabilitating even severe disabilities.

It’s also not hard to imagine athletes and coaches lusting after ways to extend their brains to take in their golf clubs, bats, ball, shoes, skis, or whatever.

But I can’t help but think that connecting a tool to the body schema depends a lot on the kinesthetic sensing abilities of the person connected. In his book on applying the Feldenkrais Method to skiing, the late Jack Heggie tells the story of a client who had such a breakthrough after Feldenkrais lessons:

“We’ll it was in the middle of the afternoon. All the powder had been skied off the trails, so I was dodging into the tree to get more powder there. I was skiing along, and then I guess the tip of my left ski hit something under the snow. It felt like a small branch. I felt it hit the tip of my ski, and then slide all the way down the length of the ski to the tail. The sensation was just as clear as if the branch had scraped along the sole of my foot. It was as if I had suddenly grown nerve endings into my ski.”

Peripersonal space is the explanation for why your body extends much further than you might think. It's fascinating to read about it, but it's even more so to experience it.

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