The newest episode of the public television program “Your Fantastic Mind” takes viewers inside Lena Ting’s lab in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, where researchers are knocking subjects off balance to understand how we move.
The episode, “Game Changers,” shows how Ting and her colleagues use a unique moving platform to yank the rug from under subjects in their quest to study movement, human balance and gait, and the complex interplay of the nervous system and musculoskeletal system.
“You don’t think about balance,” Ting says in the episode. “However, it’s a super complex interaction of many parts of your brain, your nervous system, your muscles and sensory system, that is constantly shifting around without your awareness.”
Ting, McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair and professor, also explains how her team collects mountains of data about muscle activity and biomechanical forces alongside data from the brain to deepen our understanding of balance and movement disorders and find new ways to help people suffering from them.
