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.

▲ 0fflineuser 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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

▲ dylan604 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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ghostpepper 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	dylan604 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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yjftsjthsd-h an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

...and did it work?

	▲	dylan604 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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

▲ JusticeJuice 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's the original end to end testing!

	▲	faitswulff 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There's another end to test, yet!

▲ throw310822 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲ raverbashing 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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

	▲	sowbug an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.