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Balance
Balance
Amazing Facts
  • Arulanantham Suresh Joachim of Sri Lanka set the world record for balancing on one foot: 76 hours and 40 minutes, from May 22 to May 25, 1997.
  • The greatest 19th-century tightrope walker, Jean Francois Gravelet-alias Charles Blondin-of France, made the earliest crossing of Niagara Falls on June 30, 1859. He balanced himself on a 3-inch-wide hemp rope that was suspended 160 feet in the air.
Delicate Balance
Can you balance on one foot while patting your head and rubbing your stomach? If you can, you should thank the vestibular organs in your ears. In addition to helping you hear, organs in your ear also play an important role in your ability to balance-to walk without falling, get up from a chair, and climb stairs without looking like a total klutz.
 
Deep in your ear is a complex maze of passageways that contain three semicircular canals. They are filled with fluid and have thousands of microscopic hairs. When your body moves, your head also moves, causing the fluid to swish around inside the canals. This in turn moves the tiny hairs, which alert your brain that your head is moving. Based on the messages received from all of the canals in both ears, the brain can figure out exactly how fast and in which direction the head is moving-up or down, right or left. Together with other information received from the eyes, muscles, and joints, your brain decides exactly which muscles in your body to move so that you'll stay balanced.
 
If you spin around in circles or take an awesome amusement park ride, you feel dizzy because you've been moving around so much that the fluid in your semicircular canals keeps sloshing around, even after you've stopped moving. Once the fluid settles down, your brain gets the idea and you recover your balance.
 
All Ears
Of all the organs in the human body, God chose the ear—the same organ responsible for hearing—to control balance. The Hebrew word for ear, ozen, comes from the same root as the Hebrew for “scales of justice (moznei tzedek)” (Vayikra 19:36). Perhaps God placed balance and hearing in the same body part in order to teach us that balanced judgment and hearing are very closely related. Justice requires us to hear a story from both sides; maybe that’s why we have two ears on opposite sides of our head. Justice also requires us to process what we’ve heard from both sides in conjunction with other information, such as evidence, before we come to a final conclusion. In the same way, the brain takes information from all the semicircular canals along with input from the eyes, muscles, and joints. Can you think of other connections between hearing, balance, and justice?
 
 
 
 
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