“Three of the organs are designed to detect twisting movements of the head, by sensing the discrepancy between the angular momentum of the membranes, which are attached to the bone, and that of the free-floating fluid, which lags slightly behind. The other two organs have tiny stones of calcium carbonate, which rise and fall like flakes in a snowglobe and so detect the effects of gravity and of linear head motions, if you’re walking forward, for example, or up stairs.”

Despite its meek status, the vestibular system has lately won fans among neuroscientists, who marvel at its sophistication and sensitivity, and how it tells us where we are and what we’re doing. It is not only crucial for perceptual stability, but it is also required to produce neural representations of the environment in order to accurately guide our behavior. Loss of function can produce an imbalance, which manifests as a dramatic, sudden onset of vertigo. “They praise the machine-tool precision of its parts, the way the vestibular system discovered the laws of Newtonian mechanics some 400 million years before Newton and then put those principles to use to provision the head with little organic gyroscopes and linear accelerometers.”

As evidence of the organ’s rising prestige, the first edition of the highly regarded U.S. college textbook “Sensation and Perception” (Sinauer, 2005) barely mentioned the vestibular system, but in the new edition that appeared in 2008, a standalone chapter on the subject closes the book. “I don't want to sound ungrateful,” said Daniel Merfeld, director of the vestibular physiology lab at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who wrote the chapter. “I’m just glad to be included now.”

But if “balance” is indeed our sixth sense, what’s so psychic about it? In 1991, Martin Lenhardt of the University of Virginia discovered that people could hear ultrasonic speech, using the vestibular system as a hearing organ. Ultrasound is sound with a frequency greater than the upper limit of human hearing. In other words, a new technology bypasses the normal audio mechanisms used by the body to hear sounds and provides a direct neural stimulation to the brain.

So outlandish is the concept that humans can have the hearing range of specialized mammals, such as bats and toothed whales, that ultrasonic hearing has generally been relegated to the realm of parlor tricks rather than being considered the subject of scientific inquiry.  [10]

The mental experience of “hearing voices” could consequently prove to be more than just hallucinations. The validity of ultrasonic hearing has already been clearly demonstrated by “playing opera” to a deaf subject. In one of the earliest reports, the experimental work of Dr. Roger Maass performed in 1946 was cited. “Maass, never credited again for his original discovery, made all the essential observations in regard to ultrasonic hearing phenomenology.” In 1962, Pat Flanagan was the subject of a Life magazine profile that described the teenage inventor as a “unique, mature and inquisitive scientist.”

At 15, Flanagan had already begun to demonstrate the invention that would change his life: the neurophone. Built in his home laboratory from wire and brillo pads, the device transmitted audio signals from a stereo directly into the brain, bypassing the ears entirely. Although he knew that the sound was somehow being picked up by the wearer's skin and bone, the exact mechanism would evade the inventor for 33 years. [11]

Martin Lenhardt finally recreated Flanagan’s findings in 1991 using ultrasonic signals. He discovered that the saccule, a pea-sized organ in the inner ear usually associated with balance, is also sensitive to ultrasonic sound, at last explaining how Flanagan’s invention worked. But there’s even more to the sixth sense than meets the eye. Some researchers now equate it with stress, relaxation, and various psychic abilities.

In 1975, Dr. Herbert Benson, argued in “The Relaxation Response” that prayer and meditation can play a significant role in reducing stress and hypertension. We now know that the vestibular system plays a critical role in stabilizing the visual axis (gaze) and maintaining head and body posture during meditation. The thought of having a third eye or being sealed in the forehead is a familiar religious idea, sometimes associated with neurons in the thalamus, amygdala, and cortex of the brain. But it is essentially the vestibular system of the inner ear that allows us to “balance” the two hemispheres of our brain and in due course trigger the relaxation response. “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.”(Matthew 13:9). Dysfunctions in the vestibular system can cause stress, anxiety, panic attacks, nausea, and motion sickness. It is a well known fact that prayer and meditation can produce a “trance” or altered state of consciousness related to curative powers, religious ecstasy, and increased visual imagery –– leading to relaxation and tranquillity.

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