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Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

>Elephants rely on visual cues [when striding]

So did I. I had an ear infection in the summer of 2021 that apparently caused something called "vestibular neuritis" (?). I only figured it out because I was getting up in the middle of the night and finding items of furniture (from my point of view) rushing upward to meet me as I walked upright. The doctor's explanation was:

Balance is regulated by 3 senses: {inner ear, body weight on feet, sight}. You can take away any two senses and still maintain balance via the third. In my case the infection had taken away one (inner ear), but my body could still keep my balance by seeing OR by standing still. Walking around my living room at night took away both, thus, I would fall over without knowing it.

P.S. thankfully it was only temporary

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Related, something happened with my ear supposedly as well, and I started experiencing dizzyness when turning around in the bed, and when raising myself from a lying position, even when slowly doing so.

Turns out there are "Inner Ear Crystals" that are floating around and that needs to be in the right place for you to not become dizzy. At first it sounded like new age stuff, but the medical doctor pointed out I probably had BPPV, and I started doing some exercises with body movements that are supposed to "align the crystals".

It still sounds like bullshit to me for some reason, but the exercises worked so I guess there is some truth in people needing to align the crystals in them, sometimes.

My wife had a similar diagnosis. Random dizziness, and the exercises helped resolve it for her as well. "Ear crystals" was certainly a fun thing to hear the first time!

"Adventures in Human Being" by Gavin Francis has an interesting description of the development of the Epley maneuver, which wasn't invented until ~1980. It took some time to be accepted due to a slightly different prevailing theory for the cause of BPPV and "the fact that Epley had been holding vibrators to patients' heads allowed them to label him a crank".

It sounds indeed like b$ if you phrase it like "aligning crystal vibrations". But he meant the otoliths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otolith

But in common parlance, people seem to refer to them as crystals (although I've never heard the word "vibrations" around it, that's definitely new age stuff). That Wikipedia article even uses the word "crystal" as well:

> Otoliths (also called statoliths) are agglutinated crystals or crystals precipitated around a nucleus, with well defined morphology and together all may be termed endolymphatic infillings

By any chance, did you happen to have Covid that summer? MIT bio released an article about Covid infecting or damaging the inner ear, which could lead to tinnitus or dizziness.

Here was one of the articles I read from a different lab.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9531925/

At risk of sounding like a hypochondriac, I had a diagnosed Covid infection and persistent ringing in one ear for around a week that was matched by the feeling of standing on a ship's deck and altered depth perception of objects in my backyard. The trees and bushes seemed to expand forward and grow closer to my eyes if that makes sense.

If this doesn't describe you, I didn't mean to be a bearer of unnecessary worry. The situation you stated just appeared eerily similar to mine.

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