How come whenever we lay down and close our eyes when intoxicated that it feels like we are spinning and not really when our eyes are open
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Can anyone explain to me why I love that feeling? Most people I know get sick from it. I close my eyes and ride the ride. I’ve always been in love with dizziness, really.
Maybe an add-on question but I’ve found that alcohol helps with sea sickness. Is this bc sometimes it’s beneficial to mess up the ear balance?
I used to have this when I was younger, but I never have these issues anymore, no matter how wasted I get.
In my younger days,when I was drunk. I’d lay down and the room would spin. To stop it I’d hang one foot off the bed in contact with the floor. So this makes sense.
You have something called the “saccule” in your ear that is responsible for sensing movement. The way it senses movement is that it has the equivalent of a jelly sponge on top of a bunch of “hairs”. When you turn your head, the jelly sponge moves from the rotation, and the “hairs” underlying the sponge can feel this movement and signal it to your brain.
When you drink a lot of alcohol, one of the byproducts is severe dehydration, aka everything is dried up, and this is thought to impact the jelly sponge — making it lighter and more mobile.
Not only does this mean it can move around *even in the absence of real movement*, creating a false sensation, but when you *do move*, it’s more likely that the sensitivity in each ear’s saccule is now different from variable dehydration, causing each ear’s sensation to be out of synch, causing further spins and disorientation.
Think of the latter example as one ear telling your brain your head is moving really fast and the other ear telling your brain it’s moving slow.
Use the old put one foot on the floor trick to regain the touch input, and then try to keep your eyes open a little until you can fall asleep.
Protip for if you’re drunk and getting into bed and everything is spinning; scoot to one side of the bed and put one foot on the floor. No more spinning.
It’s because your drunk brain isn’t interpreting signals from your inner ear right, that’s the organ responsible for your sense of balance, basically a biomechanical gyroscope. It’s the same reason drunk people stumble all over the place.
I don’t know but if you don’t panic and understand it’s just the alcohol causing it, it actually becomes enjoyable.
What everybody seems to have left out is, as well as effecting the inner ear directly, intoxication also can induce nystagmus, which is an involuntary rapid movement of your eyes, which provides a feedback loop with your inner ear, giving you a feeling of spinning.
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