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Galvanic vestibular stimulation: new uses for an old tool

Brian L. Day

Although known about for 100 years or so, galvanic vestibular stimulation attracted relatively little interest until some 15 years ago. This is partly because oculo-motor control has dominated human vestibular research, and those physiologists interested in the vestibular control of eye movements understandably paid little attention to it. They were quite content spinning and accelerating people to produce natural patterns of vestibular input. However, this 'natural' approach has not been so useful for those wishing to study the vestibular contribution to whole-body control. The intractable problem has been how to stimulate the vestibular system naturally without exciting other sensory systems and without interfering with the whole-body function under investigation. Galvanic stimulation is not a natural stimulus but has the advantage that it does not suffer from these serious complications. It may therefore still have an important role to play as a tool for studying human vestibular function, particularly in the field of whole-body control. In this issue of The The Journal of Physiology, Fitzpatrick et al. (1999) use the technique to study vestibular influences on walking.

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