DIZZINESS & VERTIGO

Inaccurate eye movements will often be seen when the doctor is performing neurological eye testing on the patient, looking for functional incongruence during eye movements. Information our brains receive from our eyes should match up with information our body tells our brain. These inaccuracies and inefficiencies lead to what is called a sensory mismatch. In other words, when your eye movements are inefficient or inaccurate, they send abnormal information to your brain, causing you to feel dizzy or light-headed.

When these eye movement problems result in a slow movement followed by a fast movement, the person will usually feel like they are spinning. This could be caused by a problem with your inner ear. In many cases, the spinning sensation is caused by the consequences of a sensory mismatch that causes a disruption of our central neural processing networks.

Other contributors to these sensory mismatches are cerebellar deficits (which occur when the body attempts to adapt to problems in our vestibular system), brainstem deficits (vestibular nuclei centers that receive information from peripheral vestibular structures), frontal lobe deficits, parietal lobe deficits or imbalance between two hemispheres/halves of the brain (appropriate communication between these two halves is important for allowing visual focus/attention and suppressing nystagmus or dizziness), and cervical or neck issues which send improper information to the brain.