Part 3: Improving Posture and Balance: Visual-Postural Reflexes
Why Your Eyes Shape Balance—Even Before You “See”
By Dr. David Traster, DC, MS, DACNB
Co-owner, The Neurologic Wellness Institute
Boca Raton • Chicago • Waukesha • Wood Dale
Part 1 explored how cervical input, eye position, and otolithic translation influence balance and posture.
Part 2 examined how head position relative to gravity and visual optokinetics shape brain responses that affect stability and postural control.
Part 3 focuses on visual–postural responses—how the visual system directly regulates posture and balance through fast, reflexive brain pathways. Included is a clinical video demonstrating assessment and treatment of the visual system as it relates specifically to postural and balance control.
The clinical videos are reserved for paid subscribers of this Substack. If you’d like access to the full clinical breakdown and educational video library, we’d love to have you join our paid subscriber community.
Visual-Postural Responses
Most people think vision influences balance because we see the world.
But much of visual balance control happens before conscious sight ever occurs.
A large portion of visual input bypasses the visual cortex entirely and travels directly into subcortical survival networks. From the retina, signals project not only to the visual cortex, but also to the superior colliculus, pretectal area, vestibular nuclei, thalamus, cerebellum, and brainstem reticular formation.
These pathways drive posture, eye–head coordination, and reflexive balance responses automatically.
This fast, unconscious visual system helps answer questions like:
Where is the horizon?
Is the environment moving?
Do I need to stabilize or react?
Through direct connections with the vestibulo-spinal and reticulospinal tracts, visual motion can instantly change muscle tone in the neck, trunk, and legs—without you being aware of it. This is why visual motion can make you sway, freeze, or feel dizzy even when your eyes and inner ears are “normal.”
The cerebellum uses this subcortical visual input to fine-tune timing and prediction, while the brainstem integrates it with vestibular and proprioceptive signals to decide how much postural correction is needed.
When these pathways are efficient, balance feels automatic.
When they are noisy or mismatched, the nervous system increases protection—stiffness, vigilance, and instability.
Balance training isn’t about muscles.
It’s about how the brain interprets visual information—both conscious and unconscious.
Because long before you see the world,
your brain has already decided how safe it feels to stand in it.