From Hakai Magazine, June 9:
Searching for a solution has its ups and downs.
The worst thing about being seasick is knowing you are not going to die.
Another fun fact: don’t tell this joke to the seasick. They will not laugh. I learn this onboard a whale watching vessel in Iceland’s Eyja Fjord, some 60 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. The ticket office had presented the tour with pictures of happy passengers, mouths wide open in amazement, watching a whale lift its fluke above the calm ocean surface. This tour is different. I watch waves, fog, and a good half of the passengers regretting every minute on board in nine different languages and one shared reaction—puking.
Back on land, skipper Aðalgeir Bjarnason rushes to clean the ship’s sides and deck before the next load of passengers arrives. He hoses off random puddles of vomit, concentrated at the midship and stern, exhibiting the ingredients of a nearby soup-of-the-day offer. “Corn,” he murmurs over some hard-to-get yellow pieces sticking to the boat like barnacles. “It seems like people don’t digest it properly?”
That is all he has to say about seasickness, a condition so miserable it reduces a person’s will to live, even on a sinking ship, and makes millions of people hesitant to travel on boats. Desperate sailors have, over the centuries, tried amphetamines and acupressure, ginger and green apples, and other tricks that may defeat the nausea but never fully bring the body back to normal.
Like fully digesting corn, human evolution seems to be simply out of luck when it comes to adapting to seasickness.....MUCH MORE
The only way to prevent seasickness is to avoid ships altogether, which is relatively easy. But emerging technologies may make it more difficult to escape other forms of motion sickness. Riding in driverless cars, for instance, causes increased rates of motion sickness, especially if a passenger is multitasking. Megaskyscrapers have given rise—pun intended—to a phenomenon called high-rise motion sickness. And virtual reality has a motion sickness problem called cybersickness.
The emerging problems are reviving an old field of research with a wave of grant money. Akureyri, the town nestled at the bottom of the long Eyja Fjord, is the largest community in northern Iceland and a tourism hub where whale watching is a top activity. It’s also where about 80 researchers have arrived from 15 countries, gathering for the first-ever International Congress on Motion Sickness. They are eager to solve a problem that has haunted humans since the days of traveling in boats (seasickness), on carts (cartsickness), by palanquins or litters (littersickness), and on camels (camelsickness).
Outside the harborside conference center, the whale watching ships sail by with passengers probably enacting the stubborn motion problem that’s under discussion inside the venue.
Humans have been crossing seas for at least the past 65,000 years, so it seems about time experts from around the world gather to discuss a potential solution to what’s been an intractable predicament. Despite thousands of years of breakthroughs in maritime problems—treating scurvy, for one—the fundamental understanding of seasickness is unchanged, with ancient accidental sailors likely learning the hard truth on their drifting rafts: some people suffer badly, others less so. But everyone can suffer, and solutions are elusive.
With intense-enough motion, almost anyone can be pushed toward the range of symptoms known as seasickness: increased salivation, stomach awareness (gastric feedback to the brain that says something funny is going on), vomiting, cold sweats, burping, more vomiting, yawning, increased sensitivity to odors, and more. What is happening—besides rough seas and shitty weather—is generally accepted by science as the brain reacting to sensory conflict. Before seasickness was linked to the brain, it was assumed that the human body was packaged with a sort of “do not shake” instruction. Thus, “sailing on the sea proves that motion disorders the body,” wrote the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates around 400 BCE. Then, some 23 centuries later, scientists identified the vestibular system located in the inner ear as responsible for the sensations of balance and motion.
Your body has three tools that work together to keep track of its position: vision, proprioceptive feedback (muscles, skin, and joints), and the vestibular system in your inner ears. Your eyes and muscles respond to the immediate environment. Your muscles, skin, and joints, meanwhile, keep track of what you’re feeling as you move along. Your inner ears detect circular and linear motion, and they cross-check with each other to tell you where up and down are and how you’re moving, plus they stabilize your vision.
The rising and falling motion of a ship, however, changes the cues. Your inner ear moves up and down and side to side with the waves. But your eyes and muscles are reacting to your cabin, which they perceive as stable. Wave after wave is logged in your brain as something like: !?!?!?!☠. According to an old saying, there are three types of people: the living, the dead, and the seasick....
