Can Your Tongue Affect Your Balance? What the Research Really Says
Updated: 8/31/26
Essential Points:
In one experiment, healthy young men swayed about 22 percent less when they touched their tongue to their upper front teeth. But does that mean tongue position truly improves balance?
Later studies were far less convincing. There is still no evidence that changing your normal tongue posture improves walking or prevents falls.
The stranger discovery may be the more fascinating one. Devices can turn information about head tilt into gentle patterns on the tongue, giving the brain a new way to sense balance.
While reading Balance Is Power by Jim Klopman and Janet Miller, I came across an idea that made me stop and scratch my head.
Klopman suggested that the tongue might play a role in balance. (1)
It sounded strange. Balance depends on information from the eyes, inner ears, muscles, joints, and skin. What could the tongue possibly add? Where would this muscular organ fit in?
I was curious, but skeptical. So, in the spirit of SoF, I decided to follow the evidence.
What I found was not a simple yes or no. The research on tongue position is very thin, thinner than your tongue itself if I’m being honest. Yet the tongue may still have a fascinating connection to balance, just not in the way you might expect.
Why would anyone suspect the tongue improves balance?
Klopman’s idea started with an observation. While watching people perform difficult balance tasks, he noticed that their tongues seemed to move into a particular position.
The tongue is highly sensitive, so he wondered whether pressing it against part of the mouth might send extra information to the brain. (1)
He didn’t present this as a proven fact. He presented it as a question, the kind of question that makes my job fun.
Klopman also pointed to the work of neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita. Bach-y-Rita helped develop devices that could send information about head position to the brain through small electrical patterns on the tongue. If the brain could use those signals to improve balance, perhaps the tongue was more involved in balance than people realized. (1)
That sounds like a reasonable trail of clues. However, it mixes together two very different ideas.
The first is that changing your tongue position potentially can make you steadier on its own. The second is that a device might collect balance information and use the tongue to deliver that information to the brain.
Spoiler, the evidence for those ideas is not the same.
Does tongue position change balance?
The most direct study was published in 2015. Researchers tested 116 healthy young men during a difficult standing task. The men stood with their feet together and eyes closed on a thick foam pad. (2)
Closing the eyes removed visual help. The foam also made signals from the feet and ankles less reliable. In other words, the researchers made standing still much harder than usual.
The men completed the test with their jaw and tongue at rest. They also completed it while touching their tongue to their upper front teeth.
With the tongue at the teeth, their center of gravity moved about 22 percent more slowly. The researchers took this as a sign of better stability. (2)
That sounds impressive. But there are reasons to slow down before drawing a big conclusion (2):
Each trial lasted only ten seconds.
The resting tests came from a different session.
The researchers did not compare the tested position with another meaningless tongue position.
They also did not report changing the order of the conditions from person to person.
Any of those details could affect the result.
Touching the teeth may have given the men one more sensory cue. The instruction may have made them focus harder. It could also have changed the activity of the jaw and neck muscles or caused the body to stiffen slightly.
Most importantly, less movement during ten seconds of standing does not automatically mean better walking, a faster balance reaction, or fewer falls.
Later studies were less convincing
In 2022, researchers tested 39 younger men with blindness. The participants stood with the jaw relaxed, the mouth open, the teeth clenched, while chewing gum, and with the tongue behind the upper front teeth.
None of the five conditions produced a meaningful difference in balance. (3)
This was a different group of people, so it wasn’t a perfect repeat of the first study. Still, the finding matters because the participants couldn’t use vision to help control their balance. (3)
Another 2022 study tested 48 healthy adults on a moving platform. Clenching the jaw helped during movement in one direction, but pressing the tongue produced no clear benefit. (4)
Research on the jaw, bite, and posture is also inconsistent. A 2026 review found that positive results were usually tied to narrow laboratory tasks. The overall evidence was rated as low or very low in quality. The review did not find a consistent connection between a person’s bite and their overall postural control. (5)
The tongue, jaw, neck, and balance system are connected. Of course they are, the body is full of connected parts. It’s not a textbook divided up into chapters.
But an anatomical connection is a clue. It’s not proof that one part has an important effect on another.
Right now, the evidence doesn’t support changing someone’s bite, dental alignment, or usual tongue posture to improve balance. (2,3,4,5)
The BrainPort device changes the question
https://www.wicab.com/brainport-balance-plus
This is where the story becomes much more interesting.
The tongue and roof of the mouth contain many sensory nerve endings. These nerves can detect pressure, location, and movement. Research on human tissue suggests that parts of the mouth have sensory features similar to those found in the fingertips. (6)
That doesn’t make the tongue a natural balance organ. It does make the tongue a very good place to deliver information.
That is the idea behind the BrainPort balance device.
Imagine an electronic level connected to a small mouthpiece. A sensor detects which way the person’s head is tilting. A grid of electrodes then creates a gentle pattern of stimulation on the tongue.
If the person tilts left, the pattern moves left. The person moves until the pattern returns to the center. (7,8)
The tongue is not sensing the tilt. The electronic sensor is.
The tongue is acting more like a small biological screen. It gives the brain information that the eyes, feet, or damaged inner ears may not be providing clearly.
This process is called sensory substitution. The device takes information normally carried by one sensory system and sends it through another working route.
The inner ear is not repaired. Instead, the brain learns that a pattern on the tongue means the head is leaning in a certain direction. (7,8)
Small studies have shown that healthy adults can use tongue-based feedback to reduce sway with their eyes closed. The feedback seems most useful when another source of balance information has been removed or made less reliable. (7,9)
That is pretty dang cool. However, it doesn’t show that the normal resting position of your tongue plays any major role in everyday balance.
Can BrainPort help people with vestibular loss?
Early studies reported improvements in standing, walking, balance confidence, and dizziness among people with damage to the balance system of the inner ear.
One study included 28 people. Another included only seven. Neither had a strong control group. The participants also performed balance exercises, so we cannot tell how much improvement came from the device itself. (8,10)
A larger manufacturer-sponsored trial enrolled 147 people with vestibular problems. It compared stimulation that participants could feel with stimulation below the level of conscious awareness.
The trial ended in 2010, but no results have been posted on its ClinicalTrials.gov record. (11)
That’s an important missing piece. This trial was larger and better controlled than the promising pilot studies. Without the results, we can’t know whether the device provided any meaningful benefit.
Standard vestibular rehabilitation has much stronger evidence. It can improve dizziness, balance, and daily function in people with certain types of vestibular loss.
Tongue-based feedback remains an interesting possible addition, not a replacement for established care. (12)
Final Thoughts: So can your tongue affect your balance?
Possibly, under certain conditions.
Touching the tongue to the upper teeth may change how much a person sways during a very difficult standing test. Though, that finding has not been consistent.
We also don’t know whether it matters during walking, a sudden loss of balance, or an actual fall.
There’s no convincing evidence that normal tongue posture is an important cause of balance problems. There’s also no evidence that training yourself to hold your tongue in a certain position will reduce your risk of falling. (2,3,4)
The more convincing discovery is also the stranger one.
Your tongue might not be secretly keeping you upright, but it can act as a sensitive message board for the brain if it has a bit of technological support. With the right device, information about balance can be turned into a pattern on the tongue, and the brain can learn what that pattern means.
That’s not quite the claim that first caught my attention in Balance Is Power, but it sure is an interesting find I never would have known about.
Thanks for sending me down the rabbit hole, Mr. Klopman!
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References
Klopman J, Miller J. Balance Is Power: Improve Your Body’s Balance to Perform Better, Live Longer, and Look Younger. Lioncrest Publishing; 2016.
Alghadir AH, Zafar H, Iqbal ZA. Effect of tongue position on postural stability during quiet standing in healthy young males. Somatosens Mot Res. 2015;32(3):183-186. doi:10.3109/08990220.2015.1043120
Alghadir AH, Zafar H, Iqbal ZA, Anwer S, Iqbal A. Effect of static and dynamic jaw positions on postural stability among people with blindness. Brain Behav. 2022;12(9). doi:10.1002/brb3.2645
Fadillioglu C, Kanus L, Möhler F, et al. Influence of controlled masticatory muscle activity on dynamic reactive balance. J Oral Rehabil. 2022;49(3):327-336. doi:10.1111/joor.13284
Carda-Navarro I, Sanchez-Albero A, Guinot-Barona C, García-Miralles E, Marqués-Martínez L, Aura-Tormos JI. Occlusal conditions, postural control and plantar parameters in adults and growing subjects: a systematic review of objective assessment methods. Front Dent Med. 2026;7:1887418. doi:10.3389/fdmed.2026.1887418
Moayedi Y, Michlig S, Park M, Koch A, Lumpkin EA. Somatosensory innervation of healthy human oral tissues. J Comp Neurol. 2021;529(11):3046-3061. doi:10.1002/cne.25148
Vuillerme N, Pinsault N, Chenu O, Demongeot J, Payan Y, Danilov Y. Sensory supplementation system based on electrotactile tongue biofeedback of head position for balance control. Neurosci Lett. 2008;431(3):206-210. doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2007.11.049
Danilov YP, Tyler ME, Skinner KL, Hogle RA, Bach-y-Rita P. Efficacy of electrotactile vestibular substitution in patients with peripheral and central vestibular loss. J Vestib Res. 2007;17(2-3):119-130. doi:10.3233/VES-2007-172-307
Vuillerme N, Pinsault N, Chenu O, Boisgontier M, Demongeot J, Payan Y. How a plantar pressure-based, tongue-placed tactile biofeedback modifies postural control mechanisms during quiet standing. Exp Brain Res. 2007;181(4):547-554. doi:10.1007/s00221-007-0953-9
Barros CGC, Bittar RSM, Danilov Y. Effects of electrotactile vestibular substitution on rehabilitation of patients with bilateral vestibular loss. Neurosci Lett. 2010;476(3):123-126. doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2010.04.012
ClinicalTrials.gov. Safety and efficacy study of BrainPort Balance Device in peripheral vestibular dysfunction. NCT00768378. Updated June 28, 2012. Accessed August 31, 2026. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT00768378
Hall CD, Herdman SJ, Whitney SL, et al. Vestibular rehabilitation for peripheral vestibular hypofunction: an updated clinical practice guideline from the Academy of Neurologic Physical Therapy of the American Physical Therapy Association. J Neurol Phys Ther. 2022;46(2):118-177. doi:10.1097/NPT.0000000000000382
