Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think
- Increasingly bad posture is being seen due to phone usage and other bad habits.
- Researchers have discovered “posture cells” that can be isolated from movement.
- This could have a profound effect on our understanding of body schema.
“Sit up straight” is a command you likely grew up hearing from disgruntled parents ignorant of how child bodies could slouch at such obtuse angles.
This directive has no doubt increased in the smartphone era, where extreme flexion in the upper back is poised to lead to an onslaught of kyphosis in older age. Then again, with parents also staring at their phones, pitching their heads forward at anatomically aggravating angles, who knows if they’re even paying attention to anyone else at the table.Posture is important, not only for awareness. How we carry ourselves is mythological in stature: to be successful is to “hold one’s head up high,” whereas a life of suffering is certain to follow those who “hold the weight of the world on our shoulders.” Of course, this weight is in the hands, the eyes following the trajectory of the alternative reality on the screen. Postural habits have system-wide effects well beyond the chronic rounded thoracic spines we see on a daily basis.
Movement is also a system-wide activity, dependent upon the coordination of your brain and body as directed via your nervous system. But what about posture? Your “body schema” is the relationship between the seemingly disparate regions of your body, how they coordinate to move you around the world. Posture has long been subsumed into this schema. A research team based at Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at Norwegian University of Science and Technology wanted to know if you could isolate posture from the rest of movement phenomenon.
So they recruited eleven rats to…
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