12/03/2025
The Importance of Neck Afferents by Dr. Julia Treleaven
1. Neck afferents are important, as all afferents are in the body, for providing movement acuity, joint stability, coordination, muscle stiffness, and providing that sort of feedforward and feedback response in response to movement.
2. They’re also really important for sensorimotor control — knowing where your head is in relation to your body, being able to control postural stability and dynamic balance, oculomotor control, coordination of the trunk and the head and the eyes and the head.
3. They can also substitute for vestibular or visual problems. It can up-regulate to provide more information so that people who’ve got a vestibular decline or a visual decline, they can up-regulate and it can compensate.
4. Relevance for function is it’s getting our eyes and our ears where it needs to be. Our neck is really designed to get our head where we need to be for our eyes and our ear.