![]() Human beings did not evolve as a species to do these things. It explains in part why astronauts experience transient nausea while adapting to weightlessness, why sailors get seasick and why watching a movie on your iPad in the back seat of a car or playing an immersive virtual reality video game may become unpleasant. The downside of this process is that the nervous system is unprepared for things with which it has no experience. It helps you get better at coordinating your movements and maintaining your balance while you’re growing, and helps you recover from imbalance and disorientation due to injury, illness and aging later in life. The efficiency of this system is based on experience and outcome, and it works well. Your brain constantly monitors this reflex behavior, making continual adjustments to make sure that your eye and head movements match perfectly. It does so based on feedback from the sensors in your inner ear that focus on balance. For example, to see clearly while turning your head, your brain moves your eye opposite and equal to the motion of your head. When processing sensory information and generating motor commands, the brain constantly monitors and adjusts its inputs and outputs to perform the tasks of life efficiently. Instead, motion sickness is the result of your nervous system functioning optimally, based on what it’s learned throughout your life. It’s not usually due to illness or pathology. Mismatch of a great system and unusual situationĪny moving environment can trigger motion sickness. Ultimately, we hope to produce treatments for people who are disabled by a loss or disruption of these senses. In my laboratory, my colleagues and I reproduce these kinds of complex motions and conflicting sensory inputs and study how the brain uses them during development, in normal adult behavior and in disease. To my brain, emptying my stomach contents and forcing me to rest and recuperate seemed the perfect solution.įor me, this event preceded a lifetime of work studying the vestibular system, which are the inner ear and brain structures and functions that allow you to remain oriented and stable in space. My brain recognized something was wrong and attempted to save me from things that it was designed to deal with – poisoning or other illness. I was in an environment that conflicted with a lifetime of expectations about how sensory information usually combined to inform me about the world. Sensory signals from the muscles and joints of my body were providing information that was like a cross between the visual input from my eyes and the balance feedback from my inner ears’ motion detectors. But my inner ear was signaling all of this movement to my brain. My eyes were unaware that we were, in fact, shifting up, down and side to side with the waves. I was focused on my immediate environment – the table covered with ocean specimens – which was visually stable. In retrospect, this was the perfect situation for a bout of motion sickness. I didn’t feel back to normal until the next day. Once back on shore, I felt as if I were still moving. There were intense waves of nausea, and I began vomiting. I felt exhausted, although I was well rested. Then, slowly I began to feel warm and to salivate. ![]() I was unaware of the boat’s gentle pitching and rolling, instead concentrating on the mud and organisms on a table in front of me. It was a day trip, the weather was good and the sea was calm. My first experience with motion sickness was as a college student, standing on the back of a marine research vessel looking at interesting things dredged from the seafloor off the California coast. The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
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