Tonic vibration reflex is a sustained contraction of a

muscle Muscle is a soft tissue, one of the four basic types of animal tissue. There are three types of muscle tissue in vertebrates: skeletal muscle, cardiac muscle, and smooth muscle. Muscle tissue gives skeletal muscles the ability to muscle contra ...

subjected to vibration. This reflex is caused by vibratory activation of

muscle spindles Muscle spindles are stretch receptors within the body of a skeletal muscle that primarily detect changes in the length of the muscle. They convey length information to the central nervous system via afferent nerve fibers. This information can be ...

— muscle receptors sensitive to stretch. Tonic vibration reflex is evoked by placing a vibrator — which in this case is typically an electrical motor with an eccentric load on its shaft — on a muscle's tendon. 30–100 Hz vibration activates receptors of the skin, tendons and, most importantly, muscle spindles. Muscle spindle discharges are sent to the spinal cord through

afferent nerve fiber Afferent nerve fibers are axons (nerve fibers) of sensory neurons that carry sensory information from sensory receptors to the central nervous system. Many afferent projections ''arrive'' at a particular brain region. In the peripheral nerv ...

s, where they activate polysynaptic reflex arcs, causing the muscle to contract. The effects of sustained vibratory stimulation on muscle contraction, posture and kinesthetic

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...

s are much more complex than merely contraction of the muscle being vibrated. Russian scientists Victor Gurfinkel, Mikhail Lebedev, Andrew Polyakov and Yuri Levick used vibratory stimulation to study human posture control and spectral characteristics of electromyographic (EMG) activity.

References

* * English Translation * * * * English Translation *{{cite journal , doi=10.1007/BF01052289 , last1=Lebedev , first1=M. A. , last2=Polyakov , first2=A. V. , title=Analysis of the interference electromyogram of the human soleus muscle under vibrational stimulation , journal=Neurophysiology , volume=23 , pages=47–54 , year=1991 , s2cid=19403562 Reflexes

See also

References