The Science Behind Why You Feel Sick When You Try to Read in Your Car
Some people feel nauseous when they try to read on the road, others do it blissfully, but if you’re one of those people who just can’t flip through a page without feeling nauseous, there is finally a good reason for that. Basically, your brain thinks it has been poisoned. That’s why.
The Science of Us explains in more detail, but here are the highlights from an interview with neuroscientist and writer Dean Burnett on NPR. In short, it all starts with the thalamus , the part of your brain responsible for interpreting sensory signals. When you move normally, or even drive a car, your body and brain receive the same signals: you are in motion, you feel rumbling or swaying as you move, you can even feel the distance you are traveling. On the other hand, when you move but read , things are different and these signals do not match:
What’s going on there is that the brain is receiving mixed messages. It receives signals from muscles and eyes that we are motionless, and signals from balance sensors that we are in motion. Both of these statements cannot be correct. There is a sensory discrepancy. And from an evolutionary perspective, the only thing that can cause this sensory mismatch is a neurotoxin or poison. So the brain essentially thinks it has been poisoned. When he is poisoned, the first thing he does is get rid of the poison, in other words, he vomits. And as a result – well, as soon as the brain gets confused by something like that, it says, oh, I don’t know what to do, so just get sick, just in case. And as a result, we get motion sickness, because the brain is constantly worried about being poisoned.
Some people have this reaction stronger than others. If you’re just driving, you can look out the window and see the world pass by, which can soothe your nausea reactions. For others, reading on the train is fine because you can still occasionally look up and be aware that you are moving, but for others, as soon as you focus on the page and turn off the rest of the world (and other visual sensory information) well then that’s it. goes downhill.
Of course, understanding why this happens does not explain why it happens to some people and not to others, except, as Burnett explained in his interview, that this is just a quirk of neurological development. Some people are more capable of being immune to this reaction, while others are more susceptible to it. In any case, at least you know why this happens if it happens to you.
Reading Is Nauseous Because Your Brain Thinks It Has Been Poisoned | Science about us