If you can read books while driving, you can be considered quite lucky because about a third of the population, reading while traveling in a car, on a boat, on a train or on an airplane quickly does they feel nauseous, also known as motion sickness . So why do we get motion sickness?
The most common concept to explain this phenomenon is due to miscommunication between the senses . When traveling by car, your body receives two very different messages. Your eyes are seeing the inside of the car, seemingly motionless. Meanwhile, your ears tell your brain that you’re accelerating.
The ear has another important function besides hearing. A group of structures deep inside the ear is known as the vestibular system, which gives us our sense of balance and movement. Inside, there are three small semicircular tubes capable of sensing movement, one for each dimension. And there were also two hair-thin masses filled with liquid. As you move, the fluid changes and stimulates the hairs, telling your brain whether you’re moving horizontally or vertically.
Motion sickness is thought to be caused by miscommunication between the senses.
Combined, your body can sense the direction of motion, acceleration, and even angle of motion. So, when you’re in the car, the vestibular system is right about your movement, but your eyes don’t, especially when you’re glued to the page of a book.
The opposite can also happen. While sitting still in a movie theater and the camera creates fast movements on the widescreen. This time your eyes think that your body is moving while your ears know that you are still sitting still. But why does this conflict of information make us feel so miserable?
Scientists don’t know for sure either, but they think the cause is evolution. As you know, fast moving vehicles and video recording technology have only been around for a few centuries, a very small period in evolution. For most of human history, there wasn’t much that could cause these kinds of perceptual disturbances except poison, in which case the body issued an unpleasant command to get rid of everything it didn’t. we ate out.
This theory seems pretty convincing, but there are a lot of things that still remain unexplained such as why women are more susceptible to motion sickness than men, or why passengers are more prone to vomiting than drivers. . We all know some common methods to combat motion sickness like looking at the horizon, chewing gum, taking some anti-nausea pills, but no method is absolutely certain.
The cause of motion sickness may be evolutionary.
At NASA, when astronauts are blasted into space at 27,000 km/h, getting drunk becomes a serious problem. Therefore, in need of more research on the latest technology in the space age, NASA has spent a lot of time trying to find ways to help astronauts avoid vomiting by carefully preparing their diets.
Like understanding the mystery of sleep, motion sickness is still one of those problems that sounds simple, but there are still many hidden corners that need to be explored by science.
Interesting reasons for motion sickness