I have found that keeping the horizon in sight greatly reduces the upchuck reflex, I guess by keeping all the senses in sync. In a car, put down your phone or book and watch the scenery go by; on a ship, make sure you’re outside on deck or at least near a window, where you can see the horizon. Not sure if this works for air sickness; never experienced it.
Wired has an article today about motion sickness and self-driving cars.
Okay, so motion sickness occurs when what we see does not match what we hear. But why would that make us hurl? Shouldn’t we get a headache instead?
Dunno. One of life’s little mysteries.
No, it’s when what we see doesn’t match our other balance senses (proprioperception [body part location awareness] and the inner ear. And the main theory it’s an adaptation against poison, since poisons will often mess up the senses. You throw up to get rid of the poison.
And it does very often cause a headache, too. A weird one that, to me, is actually worse than the nausea.
Perhaps what the Pope is going to use for his trip to Bolivia to help with altitude sickness would work for motion sickness as well.
One of the benefits of self driving cars is that self driving cars can communicate with one another and make decisions to avoid collisions. This means that things like stop signs and stop lights could be eliminated. As a self driving car approaches an intersection, it can communicate with other cars also planning to go through. The cars will calculate their projected paths, and then vary the speed and direction to avoid collisions.
Here’s a video about Autonomous Intersection Management. The fun part is the simulation of an intersection at the 55 second to 1:15 mark. Imagine being in one of the cars in this simulation as you go careening through this intersection. Cars are dodging you from the left and right just missing you by inches. Cars turn right in front of your car without your car or the other car even slowing down. And, you have no control. You’re just along for the ride.
It gives a whole new meaning to motion sickness.
I KNOW it isn’t the major cause of car sickness, but has anyone ever take into account the possibility of carbon monoxide or whatever is in car exhaust for causing car sickness? I’ve been in someones car where they had an exhaust leak, that made me pretty nauseated, but it also causes headaches too. If you drive a car that might not be in the best shape and you also get a headache and/or nauseated I would check out if you have an exhaust leak, or at least make sure some of your vehicle exhaust isn’t making its way into the cabin, maybe through an open rear window or something. I remember there being something about it on the news on those pickup trucks that had the rear slider opening windows and exhaust coming in.
Looking at the horizon has never helped me. 23andme has been working to identify possible genetic components through signs and symptoms that correlate with motion sickness.
According to author Mary Roach in her book Packing for Mars, it’s location-location-location. She did a section on motion sickness (since it applies to space travel). I checked the book out from the library, so all I can do is paraphrase from memory, the part of the brain that process this stuff is adjacent to the part that makes us nauseous.
The signals get a little crossed and it goes into the gonna-make-you-hurl part of the brain.
Thank you Google books. I thought there was a good chance Packing for Mars had been scanned. (It’s a fun read if you like that sort of light science book.):
[INDENT]“In the case of motion sickness, vomiting is an impressive lot of bother for no apparent reason. Vomiting makes sense as a bodily response to poisoned or contaminated food — gets it out of you ASAP — but as a reaction to sensory conflict? Pointless, says Oman. He says it’s just an unfortunate evolutionary accident that the emetic brain happened to evolve right next to the part of the brain that oversees balance. Motion sickness is most likely a case of cross talk between the two.”[/INDENT]
I think I remembered pretty well considering the book was a read-once years ago.
Interesting. Now we just need to get our resident neurologist (we have one, right?) to let us know if cross-talk is a real brain phenomena.
Well, I admit, Charles Oman, resident motion sickness expert at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, this guy here who Roach was interviewing is not a neurologist.
I missed the part above where the author was quoting a source and not just expressing her opinion. I didn’t know what the author’s expertise was in, but Dr. Oman is obviously qualified!