ELI5, why might someone get car sick, but not feel sick riding rollercoasters?
In: Biology
Possibly the duration and style of the experience, coupled with expectations.
Motion sickness is typically caused by a disconnect between what your eyes perceive and what your body (by way of the liquid in your inner ear) perceive. Tons of people get very “car sick” when reading in a car because their eyes perceive that they are not moving (they are looking at a fixed point in their lap) but their inner ear does perceive motion. The disconnect between the two triggers nausea.
But in the case of a rollercoaster, despite the fact that you’re getting thrown all over the place, what you see and what you experience line up. Your eyes tell your brain that you’re going up a big hill and then flipping upside down, and your inner ear goes “yeah, that sounds about right, we totally flipped upside down.”
That doesn’t mean that rollercoasters don’t make some people sick, but I’d be inclined to believe that less people get sick on rollercoasters than get motion sick doing stuff like playing on their phone or reading in the car primarily because there’s no giant disconnect between the motion and the visual stimulus.
It would be interesting to do an experiment where you had people ride rollercoasters both under normal conditions and blindfolded and recorded their perception of nausea afterwards.
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