How carsickness works
In: Biology
Imagine you have blocks in different shapes. You feel them with your hands, observe them with your eyes.
When you see a square and feel a square. Everything is fine.
People who get motion sickness don’t always have this line up. They might see a square, but feel a cylinder block.
But that’s weird. You see something else than you feel. Because your brain can’t handle that it thinks something is wrong.
Motion sickness gets worse when people who suffer from it are not actively looking, but are for example reading on their phone. They see a steady, non moving environment, but they feel a moving one.
ERROR!
Because your brain doesn’t know what is wrong, it will try to make sure it gets rid of what might be causing this issue. A poison, hallucinogenic perhaps? It makes you feel sick so you throw up what might be causing this error.
Ofcourse the cause of the error doesn’t lie in food with motion sickness, so it doesn’t help. What does help is making sure to focus on your journey. This is why people with motion sickness do better in the passenger seat of a car or in the front of a busses, they have a clearer view of what is going on around them so what they feel matches up better with what they see.
Your brain has motion sensors and it also collects information through your eyes. When those disagree, like you feel like you’re moving when all the things around you are not, that’s a problem. Because poisoning causes similar problems, your brain calls out “dump out the poison in the stomach”.
Your inner ear, which controls your balance, is telling your brain that you’re moving. Your eyes don’t notice all the small bumps in the road and subtle swaying that your inner ear is picking up. And your brain is receiving both of these signals and doesn’t understand what’s going on, and this makes you nauseous.
The reason why that information mismatch makes you nauseous isn’t as clear, but it might have something to do with the body perceiving it as a hallucination or poisoning, and throwing up could clear that out of your system.
AFIK, this isn’t proven but its a fun and plausible explanation:
When you eat poison, sometimes your vision spins but your motion detectors in your inner ear don’t. Humans evolved the reflex to throw up when this happens in case that will help to get rid of the poison. When you’re in a car, your motion detectors go off, but your eyes tell you that the insides of the car isn’t moving. Your brain thinks this means you’re poisoned so it makes you vomit. You can help get rid of the feeling by looking out the window and seeing that you are moving so your motion detectors and eyes agree on whats happening.
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