Comment by jonshariat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonshariat | Hacker News Reader

Another article hiding the main information in a wall of text.

Here is the relevant information for those interested:

""Enter a young inventor named Samuel Owen, who has developed a prototype device called the OtoTech, from Otolith Labs. Worn on a headband behind the ear, it uses subtle vibrations to change the way the brain computes the fact that the body that it’s attached to is in motion. Early tests show it relieves motion sickness without the side effects of drugs, Owen said, though he admits the science is so young that it’s not clear just how.

The vibrations emanating from the OtoTech gently target two of the four fibers that carry data about body motion to the brain via a system of inner ear sensors called the vestibulocochlear nerve. “Two [of the four vestibulocochlear nerve fibers] go to the brain, two go to your reflexes,” Owen said. The trick is to affect the former and not the latter.

“The working hypothesis is that [the vibration] causes a chaotic and noninformative stimulus to go to the brain. Somewhere, probably the cerebellum, there’s a filtering mechanism that filters out noninformative sensed information. It’s the reason you don’t notice the shirt on your back right now,” he said.

In other words, while you remain consciously aware that you’re moving, the balance portion of your brain stops noticing the fact; the data has been drowned out in white noise from the device.""

I found that for myself and for a bunch of friends that chewing gum accomplished this.

Discovered this on a fairly bumpy flight, (gum is lousy for ear pressure imbalances but I carry it anyway). After that I began experimenting on others and it usually worked for them too.

Chewing gum also helps to minimize crying while cutting onions.

So does sharpening your knife.

It's funny, I don't remember hearing this before, but once you point it out it seems mind-bogglingly obvious.

There's a kitchen skills book whose title is a nod to sharp knife = less crying relationship but I'm stumped trying to remember what it's called.

This is the top Google result for "sharp knife = less crying":

https://www.amazon.com/Sharper-Your-Knife-Less-You/dp/014311...

Pretty sure this doesn’t work when you are cutting 5kg of onions

As one usually does when preparing a meal.

I had to do this once. And think of all the apprentice chefs doing this.

They must have a better way. And their way will work for 1 onion or 50!

This is bad science. This is not a real thing. Neither does running water nearby, or lighting a candle in the kitchen. None of this affects the root cause of your problem.

Onion tears are caused by 2 different chemicals held apart by the onion's cellular structure. Every time you cut an onion, the cells rupture and mix, aerosolization and making you cry when the acid gets into your eyes. A sharp knife (as mentioning in another comment) would help minimize the amount of cellular damage and therefor the gas produced. You can also wear goggles.

Everything else is bunk. From-A former professional chef and person particularly sensitive to onions. (I just learned to cut onions with my eyes closed)

not EVERYTHING else is bunk. Running water nearby might not help but cutting your onions submerged in water would definitely help. Another one is just simple good ventilation. Set up a fan near you and the chemicals will be blown away instead of gradually increasing in concentration around your eyes.

Refrigerate your onions before cutting them.

Don’t know why everything else would automatically be bunk.

Sorry, that's a bit hyperbolic on my part. There's so many old wive's tales out there about how to deal with onions. People try to solve it as though the tears were magical and not caused by (relatively) simple chemical reactions.

If you refrigerate your onions, you might be fine for some amount of time and you'll be lessening damage and it's going to help but not solve it at volume (cut one onion, you're fine. Cut 100, not so much).

You could take them out of the fridge in batches....

> You can also wear goggles.

Or even just contact lenses. At least for me it eliminates onion tears completely. I had been using them for at least a decade before I started to cook my own proper food, I'll never forget that one time I tried cutting up onions wearing my glasses instead...

Some people yes, others no? Contacts would seemingly help, but you're still going to have a build up of acid in your eyes that could eventually become irritating with enough volume.

I've known people who just have seemingly no reaction to onions whatsoever, and others who break into tears the second the first cut happens.

Yeah ymmv, but to me it's night and day - with lenses I'm in your first group, without them I'm in the other. Of course I've never cut more than maybe 20-30 onions at a time, but I never felt much of anything doing that. A single cut without lenses on had my tears flowing instantly. I finally got what all the fuss was about - turns out it's not fussing at all. :)

I only wear one contact lens, and when I cut onions, the eye with the contact lens is irritated less than the eye without the contact lens.

> Everything else is bunk

Going fast works.

If you're not a professional, using an onion comb (which costs less than $2 and lasts a lifetime) will change your onion-cutting experience. It lets you go way faster and therefore reduce the time you're exposed to tear-inducing chemicals (assuming you're cutting 1-2 onions and not cooking for a whole army).

It's likely that at least half of the effect of a sharp knife is due to time improvements too.

Did you ever try just breathing through your mouth instead of your nose while cutting? This minimizes the exposure via sinuses and works pretty well for me.

It also changes airflow, so the droplets are not pulled directly up towards your eyes, like breathing through your nose does. I might look like a dopey mouth breather, but no tears as long as I concentrate on my breathing.

Open the freezer door and stick your head in with your eyes open. Immediate relief.

I used to wear a co-worker's motorcycle helmet when goggles weren't available.

So does washing the peeled onion before cutting it.

I'll have to try that. My one weird trick here is a little different.

Long ago I read somebody's theory (Bruce Chawin's, maybe?) that the reason so many poisons cause dizziness is that the inner ear is an extremely delicate mechanism and so is easily thrown off such that visual perception and positional sense no longer matches what the ear is saying. The theory further suggests that the brain is evolved to work that backwards: if the body is sufficiently dizzy, it has been poisoned, so it had better empty the stomach.

For me the trick is to keep motion perception in sync with the inner ear. So if I'm on a boat, I'll aim my head in the direction we're heading and think of myself as moving with the boat. Same thing with cars: on a bumpy or swervy taxi ride I'll look straight ahead and think of myself as moving with the car.

It sounds ridiculous, but it works well for me. Living in SF, I've had many chances to try it out.

This was the home remedy for carsickness my parents used with me when I was a kid. "Look at the horizon" is how they put it. Within a couple of seconds I'd internalize the movement of the car and my gut would stabilize.

I was a miserable vomitous mass as a child and I still can't read in the car. The horizon tends to stop progression of symptoms but is pretty slow as a recovery method. It's pretty cold comfort for someone who feels like their guts are trying to escape.

At some point in late grade school I figured out it was a better use of my time to start "working the problem" rather than hold out for some folk wisdom to save me, from car sickness to sore throats (keep your neck warm to prevent laryngitis) and everything in between.

Hanging a hand out the window works much, much faster. Barring that, anything cold on the wrist will help, but it's hard to find the right spot while distressed. Air, window pane in the winter, ice, icepack (best runner up), or a can of soda.

Similar theories for why memory and smell are so tied, and why certain smells make you throw up.

I heard they experimented with lacing sheep carcasses with ipecac syrup in Africa to keep the lions away, and it worked. You remember - viscerally - what made you sick and you avoid eating it again.

Sounds like taste aversion.

That's how I was taught to counter motion sickness in the 80s, when we were nomadic (of sorts) and did lots of cross-country drives. We didn't necessarily have to look straight ahead, but look out the window to see the motion while consciously thinking about the fact that we are actually moving. Eg, we were told to "think about the engine pushing the wheels, and the wheels pushing the road, and that's why we're moving".

30+ years later I still use that trick on the very rare occasion when I get motion sickness, and it still seems to work fine.

I don't get motion sick, and now I realize the concept of being on a boat and feeling as if the ocean is moving back and forth is completely alien to me. When I'm on a boat, the horizon appears perfectly still to me. If the boat tips, the boat looks like it's tipping to me. Likewise, if I stand on my head, the world looks right side up, but I feel as if I'm upside down. In movies sometimes they'll place a camera upside down to indicate a character is doing sit-ups on a hanging bar or something and I always thought that was a silly way to portray that since the world doesn't look upside down when you are.

Among the best solutions for seasickness are to watch the horizon, steer the boat, remove as much clothing as comfort allows, make sure there’s fatty food in your stomach, and stand so that your body is oriented in the direction of the boat’s motion.

I know those work anecdotally (for me and others with whom I’ve been on boats). They were explained to me by an ENT dr during a sailboat race to Bermuda about 20 years ago. His explanation was that it was about aligning the different signals the brain gets during motion.

The headband sounds interesting. There’s few things I’ve experienced that are more miserable than extended motion sickness.

> It’s the reason you don’t notice the shirt on your back right now...

It never ceases to amuse and sometimes amaze me how statements like this immediately arrest my attention to the thing I’ve not noticed at all. Now I’m only thinking about the shirt on my back, trying to notice it, and thinking of how I haven’t felt it since I first pulled it on this morning.

Same thing but the other way. Sometimes my shirts touching my belly cause me discomfort for some reason. Now I can blame my perhaps faulty cerebellum for not filtering it out.

If you liked the T-shirt trick, follow my instructions: Take a deep breath in. Breath out. You are breathing manually now. Don’t forget that at all times you are only two minutes away from asphyxiation.

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