Max Wühr, PhD, MSc, BA is a physicist and neuroscientist; graduated from philosophy, physics and neuroscience. Leads a research group at the German Center for Vertigo and Balance Disorders at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
When did you lose your balance last time?
Just a few days ago, on a walk with my son. It was a wet and freezing weather here in Munich, with hidden icy spots on the sidewalks. I slipped but, thankfully, managed to grab onto the pram and avoid a fall.
How many people have troubles with keeping balance?
Balance problems and dizziness are very common and one of the main reasons people visit their general practitioner or neurologist – especially in our aging society. As we get older, our sensory systems and musculoskeletal system gradually lose efficiency, and since these systems work together to maintain balance, this decline can make it harder to stay steady.
For many, this limits mobility and can stop them from taking part in social activities, which often leads to loneliness and even an increased risk of dementia. Also falls can result in serious injuries reducing mobility and even shortening life expectancy.
Physical activity is crucial for maintaining a healthy postural system, and challenges such as stress and mental health issues can further exacerbate the problem. Our increasingly sedentary lifestyle is risky.
Is modern industrial society contributing to a loss of balance? For example, risky jobs in construction, vibrations in heavy industry or transport, the use of headphones or too much screen time?
All these factors can certainly play a role in impairing postural control. Prolonged exposure to intense sensory demands, whether at work or during personal time using entertainment technology, can lead to gradual, chronic impairments in sensory function. Fortunately, our sensory systems can compensate for each other until a critical threshold is reached.
The more apparent risk factor, however, is our increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Physical activity is crucial for maintaining a healthy postural system, and challenges such as stress and mental health issues can further exacerbate the problem. In our specialized outpatient clinic in Munich, the second most common postural disorder we see is a functional balance disorder. In such cases, the individual sensory and musculoskeletal components of the postural system remain intact, but their interaction is disrupted, often due to psychological factors.
You came to your field in a rather unusual way. How do your multiple backgrounds connect to the clinical research on balance and dizziness?
I got a first touch on the issues of balance studying philosophy, namely the German phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. They were interested in how the body interacts with tools during movement and internal senses of bodily movements. After my bachelor's, I turned into neuroscience and joined a new master programme, which brought together clinical neurologists, biologists, psychologists, medical students and physicists, all studying the brain. There I first got to know the topics of my current research and realised I wanted to go into the clinical direction of neuroscience research.
Does phenomenology help you in your research?
Particularly Husserl brought me to kinesthesis. Now we measure proprioception and kinesthesis in the clinical sense and I specifically study how the senses interact with internal motor programmes. There are interesting links.
