December 20, 2012 9:49 am You’ve probably had that feeling.
You’re traveling along in the car. You start to feel a little
dizzy, light-headed. Your stomach knots and, if you’re unlucky,
you lose your lunch. Under the right conditions, motion sickness
can cripple just about anyone. (Trust NASA, they’ve tried.) But
while don’t know much about why it happens, advances in curing
it are progressing steadily. According to Scientific American,
which spoke with James Locke, a flight surgeon at NASA whose job
is to make people sick, the current theory for how motion
sickness works goes like this: “Information from both our visual
and vestibular systems is processed by the brain to match it all
up. Your vestibular system—your inner ear—is tuned to a
terrestrial, 1G environment,” Locke says. “When you move
[yourself] around, changes in your vestibular system match up
with what you’re seeing. But [riding] in an airplane or car,
your inner ear signals that you’re moving, but your eye says
you’re sitting still” because you