A Neuroscientist Explores The Illogical Behaviors Of The Mind In ‘Idiot Brain’
Dean Burnett says the human brain is like a computer that files information in a way that defies logic. According to Burnett, brains can alter memory, cause motion sickness and affect intelligence.
Here’s his answer about why we get motion sickness in moving vehicles:
“You’ve got the muscular system doing its thing and relaying all the signals to the brain. And you’ve also got the balance sensors in your ears, like, little tiny little tubes full of fluid. And the motion of that fluid tells us where we’re going. So, if we’re upside down, we can tell. And if we’re going fast, we can tell because this fluid just obeys the laws of physics. And also, you’ve got your eyes, and the world’s going past at a certain rate. All these things are sensory information which is fed into the thalamus area, which integrates all the sensory information together to give us an opinion or give us a view of what’s happening in the world around us. So we think, “Oh, well I’m moving. This is good. That’s what I should be doing. Excellent, all is well.”
When you’re in a vehicle, (and vehicles aren’t something we’ve really evolved to deal with because, obviously, they’re a very, very recent addition to the world, and evolution takes a long time to catch up with anything) so when we’re in a vehicle like a car or a train or a ship especially, you’re not actually physically moving. Your body is still. You’re sat down. Like, say you’ve got no signals from the muscles saying we are moving right now, your muscles are saying we are stationary. And also your eyes – if you are sitting in a ship, you’re looking at a static environment, so there’s no information for the eyes to say we are moving. It’s just, “Oh, everything is still.”
But the fluids in your ears, they obey the laws of physics. And they are sort of rocking and around and sloshing because you are actually moving. So what’s happening there is the brain’s getting mixed messages. It’s getting signals from the muscles and the eyes saying we are still and signals from the balance sensors saying we’re in motion. Both of these cannot be correct. There’s a sensory mismatch there. And in evolutionary terms, the only thing that can cause a sensory mismatch like that is a neurotoxin or poison. So the brain thinks, essentially, it’s being poisoned. When it’s been poisoned, the first thing it does is get rid of the poison, aka throwing up.
And as a result, as soon as the brain gets confused by anything like that, it says, “Oh, I don’t know what to do, so just be sick, just in case.” And as a result, we get motion sickness because of the brain’s constantly worried about being poisoned.”
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