Key TakeawaysAbout a third of the world’s population is highly susceptible to motion sickness.Traditionally, people have taken medications to help manage common symptoms or avoided situations that trigger motion sickness.Researchers found that visuospatial training exercises can help reduce susceptibility to motion sickness.
Key Takeaways
About a third of the world’s population is highly susceptible to motion sickness.Traditionally, people have taken medications to help manage common symptoms or avoided situations that trigger motion sickness.Researchers found that visuospatial training exercises can help reduce susceptibility to motion sickness.
You can train your brain to reduce motion sickness, according to recent research findings.
A September study published inApplied Ergonomicsfound a relationship between susceptibility to motion sickness and visuospatial ability.This refers to your ability to identify and manipulate visual and spatial relationships. Visuospatial ability is what makes it possible to judge distances, pick up objects, and walk without bumping into objects.
Researchers found people with lower visuospatial performance are more susceptible to motion sickness, and those with greater visuospatial performance are less susceptible. The good news is that visuospatial skills can weaken and strengthen, meaning people can improve their visuospatial skills and reduce their likelihood of motion sickness with training.
“We’ve discovered one perhaps potential causal relationship between motion sickness sufferers and visuospatial skills,” lead study authorJoseph Smyth, EngD, research fellow at the University of Warwick, tells Verywell. “For the general population, I think this research should give them confidence that we’re working toward methods of reducing motion sickness susceptibility.”
Motion Sickness: Symptoms, Who’s at Risk, and How to Prevent It
What This Means For YouResearchers found that exercises aimed at strengthening visual and spatial awareness can reduce feelings of motion sickness. While these exercises aren’t yet publically available, in the future you may be able to work at improving your motion sickness.
What This Means For You
Researchers found that exercises aimed at strengthening visual and spatial awareness can reduce feelings of motion sickness. While these exercises aren’t yet publically available, in the future you may be able to work at improving your motion sickness.
How Training Can Reduce Motion Sickness
Almost everyone is susceptible to motion sickness and one-third of the population is highly susceptible, according to the study. But besides medication, there isn’t much that can currently be done to curb the sickness.
The participant dropout rate also decreased in both parts. The authors argue this is a strong indicator of a reduction in motion sickness, since participants were willing and able to tolerate the simulations.
Understanding Motion Sickness
Motion sickness is still only minimally understood. Smyth says current understanding of the condition comes from the 1975 book,Motion Sickness.
“Since then, there has been a lack of progress in the field,” Smyth says. “Our knowledge as a scientific community and the field hasn’t really grown that much. That was quite shocking thinking that we’ve got all these technologies … and we don’t really understand how we can mitigate the problems from this.”
Symptoms of motion sickness include:
“When we have a mismatch of our senses, our body goes into self-preservation mode, this is explained through the evolutionary hypothesis,” Smyth says. “Our body assumes that once a mismatch is sensed, it must be because we’ve ingested some sort of poison, and that poison is responsible for these mismatches. That’s why we see the characteristics of sweating to push the toxins out of the skin, burping to alleviate gases, and eventually people emptying the contents of their stomachs—they vomit. That’s the body’s natural way of getting rid of a suspected poison.”
Not surprisingly, Smyth says people who are susceptible to motion sickness tend not to put themselves in situations where they are likely to experience motion sickness again. For example, people who are highly susceptible toseasicknessprobably wouldn’t join the Navy.
But avoiding a situation is a way to self-manage, not treat, the problem and improved technologies might make it more difficult for people to avoid these kinds of situations. Smyth hopes these exercises can make a real difference.
“We believe that we’re basically empowering the brain to reduce the visual and stimulus dependency and help the brain understand motions better, and then clarify where there are mismatches and why those mismatches occur rather than jumping directly into sensory conflict when motion sickness really kicks in," he says.
Motion Sickness and Self-Driving Cars
As self-driving and autonomous vehicle technologies advance, consumers are considering what they want to do while the vehicle drives. Smyth says the consensus is clear: People want to engage in non-driving related activities such as watching films, reading books, and working.
“A lot of people currently cannot complete work-based tasks as a passenger and that’s likely to be true for self-driving vehicles and will probably get a bit worse,” he says.
Smyth’s previous research looked at the effect motion sickness has on human performance, including driving ability.He found that even mild motion sickness could have a significant impact on cognitive processing abilities and reaction times.
“We wouldn’t give the control to a driver if we knew they were drunk,” Smyth says. “Would we give control to a user if we knew they were suffering some degree of motion sickness, even mild?”
The Future of Visuospatial Training
It’s not possible to buy a visuospatial training exercise book off the shelf today, but Smyth thinks they will be on the market eventually. He and his co-authors developed the training books used in their study based on past research.
“This is the first of its kind of findings and is a big step forward in the field,” he says. “But now the real hard work kicks in. We need to understand what specific types of visuospatial skills break down into things like spatial awareness, spatiality, and mental rotation.”
He believes these exercises will first be adopted into existing training programs where people are often susceptible to motion sickness, like those within the military, private aviation, maritime, or automotive companies. Their findings may then filter down to general consumers.
He says this will become an even more pressing issue in the future as society increasingly relies on virtual reality, self-driving cars, and other technology that can trigger motion sickness.
“We want to make sure that when we’re developing self-driving technology and cars, the benefits are not only available to select people, so making sure that they’re accessible, even for people more traditionally susceptible to motion sickness,” Smyth says.
5 Sources
Verywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
Smyth J, Jennings P, Bennett P, Birrell S.A novel method for reducing motion sickness susceptibility through training visuospatial ability – A two-part study.Applied Ergonomics. 2021;90:103264. doi:10.1016/j.apergo.2020.103264
NeuRa.Visuospatial ability.
Smyth J, Birrell S, Mouzakitis A, Jennings P.Motion sickness and human performance - Exploring the impact of driving simulator user trials. In: Stanton N. (eds)Advances in Human Aspects of Transportation. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing.786. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93885-1_40
Takov V, Tadi P.Motion sickness.
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