Why do rollercoasters/fast rides make people vomit?
In: Biology
Two main reasons:
Either they get motion sick, because the ride moves around a lot, or the centrifugal force (the outward force cause by spinning, which tends to spread things out against whatever prevents them from continuing outward) causes the matter in their stomachs to move back up through the oesophagus, and eventually the mouth.
Mostly the motion sickness thing though
Motion sickness is caused by your eyes and your ears disagreeing about your position and movement. You use both of them to find the horizon and orient yourself, to know if you’re right side up or not, to know the slope of the ground, to know if you’re moving or not.
When your eyes and ears disagree, you get nauseous. This is a survival mechanism, because very often in nature poisons will affect your inner ear or your vision. Being nauseous is a good way to teach you not to eat that thing, and if it’s really bad you will throw up which will get rid of any more of the poisonous thing left in your stomach, hopefully before you absorbed too much of the poison.
Roller coasters really mess with your inner ear. There are little tubes with fluid in them that settle down towards the center of gravity of the Earth. The acceleration of the roller coaster up and down and around corners and around loops spins and swirls that fluid around in your ears, causing them to send false, confusing signals about which direction the ground is in. That alone might be enough to make you nauseous, since your ears aren’t supposed to be that confused. But all those confused signals *definitely* conflict with what your eyes are telling you about your motion and where the ground is.
Those conflicting signals trick your brain into thinking you’ve been poisoned, so it does what it evolved to do and makes you feel nauseous so you’ll puke up the poison it thinks is in you.
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