Balance and the Cerebellum in Parkinson

Movement, tensions, and the reorganization of Body-Territory

Republican Capitalism of Spirits Without Bodies
Decolonial Spirituality Capitalism Neuroscience

The Feeling-and-Knowing Taá — when standing still becomes an experiment

I imagine myself standing barefoot on the floor.
At first, I feel only the contact: heel, toes, micro-adjustments in the ankle.
Then I close my eyes.

My body starts to “search” for balance.
Tiny oscillations that I almost never notice become suddenly óbvious:
a sway forward, a correction backward, the cerebellum working in silence.

Now I imagine this same scene with Parkinson’s disease inside my nervous system.

The feet are on the floor, but the sense of ground is fragile.
The cerebellum, basal ganglia and cortex negotiate every micro-movement with more effort, more noise, more doubt.
What for others is “just standing” becomes, for me, a full-time cognitive and motor task — a daily experiment of survival.

That is the Taá of this topic:

What does balance feel like from the inside when the cerebellum is forced to reorganize itself under Parkinson’s disease?

And this is exactly what a recent fNIRS study on postural control and Parkinson’s disease investigates — looking at how cerebellar and cortical hemodynamics change during tasks of balance, posture and movement, and how the brain tries to compensate to keep the body-territory upright.
For search, think in terms like:

“Parkinson’s disease cerebellum balance postural control fNIRS 2025 oxygenated hemoglobin dual-task”

The Feeling-and-Knowing Taá — opening a crack of decolonization

As I read this kind of study, I also notice something else:
the way I learned to talk about Parkinson and balance was colonized.

For decades, the language of clinical neuroscience trained me to see:

• my body as a defective machine,
  
  

• my mind as a list of deficits,
  
  

• my spirituality as superstition,
  
  

• my politics as individual productivity and consumption.
  
  

That same colonial lens makes many neuroscientists avoid questions that could reveal what the dominant science cannot yet name:

• the body as territory,
  
  

• movement as belonging,
  
  

• imbalance as political vulnerability in cities that were never designed for fragile bodies.
  
  

But when I feel my body before I think — when Taá appears — I realize there is no separation between Neuroscience, Politics and Spirituality (understood here as Utupe, Xapiri, living memory).

What colonizes is not only history:
it is the vocabulary that forbids me to exist as a whole being.

Every serious study on balance in Parkinson’s disease, when read with courage, opens a small crack in Zone 3 — that ideological place where we naturalize exclusion — and returns the body to what it always was:

living territory of possible worlds, even when it trembles, even when it almost falls.

The scientific question: how does Parkinson reshape balance networks?

The study we are dialoguing with asks, in practice:

When a person with Parkinson’s disease tries to keep balance, how do cerebellum and cortical regions reorganize their hemodynamics?
Which brain areas work harder to prevent a fall?

To approach this, researchers compared:

• Participants with Parkinson’s disease vs. healthy controls,
  
  

• In conditions such as:
  
  

• quiet standing,
  
  

• challenging postural tasks (narrow base, unstable surface, eyes closed),
  
  

• sometimes coupled with a dual cognitive task (for example, counting backwards or word generation).
  
  

The focus:
cerebellar-cortical interplay and how oxygenated (O₂-Hb) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (HHb) change with task difficulty.

Methods in accessible language (fNIRS, GLM, short-channels, ICA/PCA)

To measure this invisible work, the study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), with optodes placed over:

• cerebellar projections,
  
  

• motor cortex,
  
  

• prefrontal regions involved in postural control and attention.
  
  

Key analysis steps, in Brain Bee language:

• GLM (General Linear Model)
  They modeled the expected hemodynamic response to each postural condition and estimated, channel by channel, how strongly the signal followed that pattern.
  
  

• HRF and task blocks
  The hemodynamic response function (HRF) was adjusted to account for the slow rise and fall of O₂-Hb during balance tasks that last several seconds.
  
  

• Short-channels
  They used short-separation channels to capture superficial blood flow in the scalp and skull, subtracting this component from the deeper signal to better isolate true cerebral activation.
  
  

• ICA / PCA
  They applied Independent Component Analysis (ICA) or Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to separate:
  
  

• systemic noise (heart rate, breathing, Mayer waves),
  
  

• motion artifacts,
  
  

• and the more stable components related to neural control of posture.
  
  

• Group comparisons and statistics
  They then compared:
  
  

• activation levels,
  
  

• patterns of connectivity between regions,
  
  

• and task-related changes in O₂-Hb/HHb
  between Parkinson and control groups.
  
  

Main findings in first-person language

When I translate the results into my own body, I hear something like this:

• In healthy participants, balance tasks mainly recruit:
  
  

• cerebellum,
  
  

• sensorimotor cortex,
  
  

• and a moderate contribution of frontal areas.
  
  

• In Parkinson’s disease:
  
  

• there is hyper-activation in frontal and prefrontal regions,
  
  

• sometimes increased cerebellar effort,
  
  

• and a pattern suggesting compensatory recruitment: the brain spends more energy to achieve the same behavioral stability.
  
  

In harder tasks (eyes closed, unstable surface, dual task):

• participants with Parkinson show:
  
  

• stronger, more diffuse hemodynamic responses,
  
  

• greater reliance on cognitive control (prefrontal) to keep the body upright,
  
  

• and, in some cases, failure of this compensation, with near-falls or greater sway.
  
  

The fNIRS curves become a kind of metabolic signature of fragility:
even to “just stand”, the brain needs to work at high cost.

Reading these results with our concepts

Damasian Mind and Body-Territory

In the Mente Damasiana, consciousness is the weaving of interoception and proprioception.
Balance is one of the deepest expressions of this weaving:

• my vestibular system,
  
  

• my joints and muscles,
  
  

• my cerebellum predicting the next sway.
  
  

In Parkinson’s disease, this weaving is still there, but under tension.
The Body-Territory remains mine — yet part of the neural infrastructure is eroded, forcing other regions to take over with greater metabolic cost.

Eus Tensionais and Zones 1 / 2 / 3

I can recognize at least three energetic “selves” (Eus Tensionais) in these data:

• A Zone 1 Eu trying to automatize movements,
  
  

• A Zone 2 Eu that appears when posture becomes a conscious act of creativity (“how do I stand now without falling?”),
  
  

• And a Zone 3 Eu, when fear, stigma and hostile architecture (stairs, buses, sidewalks) impose ideological tension on the nervous system.
  
  

The fNIRS curves show not only neuronal activation; they show which Eu is being forced to be in charge.

Quorum Sensing Humano

Balance is also Quorum Sensing Humano: my body “negotiates” with gravity, with the floor, with people around me.
In Parkinson’s, this quorum is fragile:

• the environment stops giving safety cues,
  
  

• the city becomes an enemy,
  
  

• the person feels expelled from shared movement.
  
  

DANA and reorganization

In our DANA perspective, the intelligence of DNA keeps searching for reorganizing routes:

• residual cerebellar plasticity,
  
  

• new motor strategies,
  
  

• slower yet more stable patterns.
  
  

The study shows that even under degeneration, the organism is still trying — metabolically and structurally — to maintain dignity in posture.

Avatares Referencias

For this topic, I feel strongly guided by the Math/Hep avatar —
the avatar that watches energy accounting, tensions and resource allocation.

Through Math/Hep, I see:

• how much extra oxygenation the brain invests to keep balance,
  
  

• how long this is sustainable,
  
  

• and when the system approaches an energetic limit.
  
  

A Latin American artistic echo

When I think of walking and instability in Latin America, I remember Mercedes Sosa singing “Todo cambia”.
In Parkinson’s, everything changes: the way one stands, walks, gets up from a chair.
But the song reminds me that change can be inhabited with dignity, if society chooses to walk together instead of leaving the fragile body alone on broken sidewalks and hostile buses.

How this science adjusts our intuitions

Before seeing these hemodynamic data, I might think:

• “Tremor is the main problem.”
  
  

• “Balance is just a mechanical issue.”
  
  

• “Rehabilitation is a matter of exercises only.”
  
  

The study corrects this:

• Balance in Parkinson’s is deeply cognitive and metabolic.
  
  

• The brain recruits frontal, cerebellar and sensorimotor resources in complex ways.
  
  

• High hemodynamic cost means that environmental stressors (noise, crowding, heat) can easily push the system over its limit.
  
  

This calls us to design rehabilitation, cities and social expectations with a more compassionate, evidence-based view.

Normative implications for Latin America

• Urban planning:
  Sidewalks, ramps, public transport and plazas must be designed considering a brain that works at the limit just to keep balance.
  
  

• Public health:
  fNIRS can be integrated into low-cost clinical protocols to monitor rehabilitation of balance in Parkinson’s patients in public hospitals.
  
  

• Work and rights:
  Policies must recognize that “fatigue” in Parkinson’s is not laziness — it is measurable metabolic overload in postural circuits.
  
  

• Neuroeducation and spirituality:
  Communities of faith in Latin America can be powerful allies, if they stop reading Parkinson’s as “fraqueza” and start seeing it as a Body-Territory under tension that deserves care, not moral judgment.
  
  

Scientific keywords

To find the kind of study I am dialoguing with, combine terms such as:

“Parkinson’s disease” • “cerebellum” • “balance” • “postural control” • “fNIRS” • “oxygenated hemoglobin” • “dual-task” • “2025” • “cortical activation”

When Two Brains Receive the Same World - Cooperation, synchrony, and the shared rhythm of attention

Embodied Singing -Voice, interoception, and Body-Territory in vocal expertise

Pleasant Odors and the Breath that Organizes Us - How smell organizes brain–body coupling

Architecture That Thinks With Me - Turning corners and the attentional cost of built environments

Auditory Approach Bias From Birth - How newborns and adults code the desire to listen

Beta Waves and the Moment I Truly Decide - The prefrontal cortex as the space where "feeling" becomes "choosing"

How My Brain Encodes Voice in Midlife - F0, listening effort, and the vitality of human hearing

Learning Beside Another Brain - Hyperscanning and the pedagogy of co-presence

Reproducibility in fNIRS - When can I trust the hemodynamic curve I see?

HRfunc and the True Shape of the Hemodynamic Response - Why every brain breathes light in its own way

Mixed Reality and Decision-Making - How the brain evaluates prototypes and hybrid worlds

Intense Exercise and the Awakening of Zone 2 - The hemodynamics of effort and the body that generates intelligence

Buttoning a Shirt - Everyday actions as windows into attention, gesture, and consciousness

Depression, tDCS, and the Prefrontal Cortex - Reigniting silent circuits

Designing fNIRS Studies in Real-World Environments - Why science must step outside the laboratory to exist

Transformers and Virtual Short-Channels - AI cleaning brain signals and retelling hemodynamics

Mental Fatigue and Performance - When the head gives up before the body

Cold Water and the Brain - Oxygenation, cold, and the consciousness of the limit

Walking After Stroke - Cognitive–motor interference in everyday life

Balance and the Cerebellum in Parkinson’s Disease - Movement, tensions, and reorganization of the Body-Territory

Freezing of Gait and the Loss of the Body’s Own Quorum - When the body stops trusting the next step

Children With Cochlear Implants - Learning to hear through the brain, not just the device

Emotional Processing in Children With Oppositional Behavior - Regulation, conflict, and the birth of Tensional Selves

Mild Cognitive Impairment - Early hemodynamic signs and presence in the world

Pain, Apathy, and Depression in Dementia - When feeling and thinking stop walking together

Cognitive Load - How much does fNIRS really feel my mental effort?

The Brain in Daily Life -Assisted horsemanship, sport, and embodied enjoyment

Linguistic Jiwasa - When language thinks the world

Dialogical Multiplication and Indigenous Psychology - How to let psychology listen without erasing the Other

The Feeling and Knowing Taá of Christmas 

Republican Capitalism of Spirits without Bodies

NIRS fNIRS EEG ERP Multimodal NIRS-EEG

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