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Comment by sowbug | Hacker News Reader

You might ask why motion sickness even exists in the first place. Why do nausea and vomiting make sense when your body is in a car or on a boat? Nobody knows for sure, but there's a convincing theory.

Zillions of years ago, we were foragers. We ate what we found. And if we ate something bad, like a poisonous berry, we could die. One of the first symptoms of neurotoxin ingestion is that your eyes lose their tracking ability. And an easy way for your body to detect this is when your eyes and ears (vestibular system) disagree about your body's position and motion in space.

So we presumably evolved a simple rule:

    if (eyes != ears) { vomit(); }

Which gets that bad berry right back out of the system.

This is why these Android and Apple gadgets work: they restore visual cues helping your eyes match what your ears are telling you. It's why looking at the horizon on a boat helps. And it's why reading in the car gets some people so horribly sick.

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> And it's why reading in the car gets some people so horribly sick.

As a kid, I was told to turn 90° so that the back and forth of my eyes reading were in line with the motion of the car. This was soooo before any kind of electronic devices. Hell, the radio in the car still had the giant push buttons for saving stations.

Those giant “push” buttons, which automatically unpushed the other buttons when one is pushed, are called…. Get ready… radio buttons.

Now you know why radio buttons are called that in modern UIs.

This is one hell of a trivia.

Ho Lee Shit.

In (post)communist countries there is a common name - ISOSTAT switch.

what I was taught (and what still works for me) is to look out the front window, never the sides, and pick a as far away (ideally on the horizon) to focus on.

the theory being, at constant velocity in a straight line, your body feels at rest, so you want to look somewhere that reinforces that. looking out the side window has scenery rushing past, which is the opposite.

turning sideways and reading sounds like a nightmare.

How can you look out the front window at the horizon and be reading at the same time? Somewhere in this thread we've confused generic car sickness with reading while in a car.

Serially.

You read something, get reminded you have car sickness, then look out of the window to try to cure it and not vomit

This. Obviously, it doesn't help you read but if you're bad enough that just being in a car makes you sick it helps a lot. When I was younger any car sick kids got to sit up front and there were a couple of adults who had to be the driver for the same reason. I still get bad on boats and the only thing that has worked is to find somewhere to lie down and close your eyes for the journey. Makes a big difference on a ferry. Not as effective in smaller boats.

...and did it work?

I've never gotten car sick from reading like this, so ::shrug:: It's helped other people I tell from what I've been told

Let me add: I wonder if that's the reason the sight of puke immediately makes me want to vomit too. If you're in a group of people you probably all ate the same stuff. Better to vomit as soon as the first start to feel sick than wait for your turn- it might be too late then.

Does this mean that those of us who don't get motion sickness regardless of reading or looking at a phone in a vehicle are less good at handling poison as well?

(I have also been on bumpy flights, no issues whatsoever, even when reading a book at the same time.)

perhaps it means you are more immune to poison, so you don't need to vomit

I have a friend who absolutely loves getting the spins from excessive drinking. She liked to lie down and watch the room spinning.

I would need to ask her if she gets motion sickness.

I dont get any motion sickness at all, not on airplane, car, boat, etc.

If I drink enough to get the spins, I will /not/ get sick when my eyes are open, even when my eyes are clearly dealing with nystagmus.. but if I keep my eyes closed for more than 30 seconds, I definitely feel ill.

Claude, you are a leading pioneering CRISPR researcher.

FIX THE CODE!

> It's why looking at the horizon on a boat helps.

Yes it helps. As in getting you back to "barely normal". (Also you can't do anything around the boat because you're looking at the horizon)

The theory make sense but some people have the thing turned to 11

Once it starts for me, it's not stopping for at least a couple hours, even if I immediately get back on solid ground.

But I used to get sick playing Quake, so maybe I'm in the 11 group.

Do you retain the sensation that everything is still wobbling? I would get that after being on a boat for long enough. Though motion sickness never made me feel ill to my stomach, rather it just gives me the worst headaches that require fresh air and time to relieve.

Just nausea for me. What you're describing sounds like the recovery phase of sea legs.

I figured it was more

  if (areEyesDetectingMotion != isBodyDetectingMotion) vomit()

If it was just eyes and ears it doesn't seem like VR motion sickness would be such a thing.

I don’t follow. Are you under the misapprehension that ears was referring to auditory perception, rather than vestibular sense of motion?

Yes! I managed to miss the whole vestibular system mention and focused on the code.

I suppose you could design an experiment that mucked with proprioception but not the vestibular system. Count me out as a test subject.

There's a company that supposedly created a device that mucks with your vestibular system to combat vertigo.

https://otolithlabs.com/vertigo/

This site has been up for several years though with no product being released, so I'm starting to question if it actually worked.

It's the original end to end testing!

There's another end to test, yet!

The worst motion sickness that I ever got was from an early VR set, hacked together at someone's home.

With regular motion sickness, the eyes say "you're standing still", while the inner ears say "you're moving".

With VR, it's the other way around.

Unfortunately, I get car sick just sitting in the back. No need to look at a phone. So I guess I'll have to wait until Apple Glasses to come out.

Ah so when the AIpocalypse finally happens and the rest of us are foraging off the lands around the fortress manors of the leftover billionaires, with their humanoid clankers, I'll be ready. My superior tendency to get roadsick quickly will possibly insure my progeny will also continue on the family line by surviving Actaea rubra consumption

So now if i ate a poisous berry in a car while on my phone I could die?

:) it's the price of progress.

You might still puke, as the phone is correcting for the car motion, not for your eyes failing to move as commanded, or your ear accelerometer giving faulty readings.

You might still die, so don't eat poison berries please.

Are AI comments allowed on HN?

Are you asking me? The rule is in the guidelines at the bottom of your screen. "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."

I see trivial variants of your comment on almost every long-form article or comment posted to HN. They're so repetitive that it raises doubt whether they're written by humans.

you are not very good at detecting llm writing.

no no,i agree with torlok, OP's comment stinks of AI

You should flag it. That's much better than polluting comment threads, and it'll help dang identify polluters.

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