Why when you spin around and you stop, you feel dizzy, but when you travel in a car and stop you dont feel like you’re still moving fast?
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Your balance system owes a lot to three fluid-filled half-circle tubes in your inner ear. It’s basically like having a couple of spirit levels like carpenters use, with your brain paying attention to what the fluid is doing.
When you spin, your head gets spun, and the fluid in those canals gets spun. It takes a while for everything to settle down once you stop, so you’re getting a “spinning” signal from your balance system that doesn’t agree with input from your eyes, and you feel dizzy.
In a car, every part of you, including those canals, is moving at the same speed, with no movement relative to the car. It feels like sitting still, which it basically is. There’s nothing to mess up the fluid in the canals.
That said, visual input can have similar effects. If you watch scrolling credits for too long then look away, you may notice the illusion that everything is scrolling in the opposite direction. This means you’ve briefly tired out your “downward movement” visual neurons, so your “upward movement” neurons are winning by default.
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