Motion Sickness
My wife can’t understand how I can read in a car without feeling nauseous. For her, any trip in the back seat produces discomfort.
As well as enabling us to detect sound, the ear functions as our organ of orientation, telling us which way is up. The part of the ear which is responsible for this is a little chamber called the utricle. It is connected to three semi-circular canals which contain fluid. Together, these control our sense of balance.
When a tube moves, the liquid inside it presses back in the opposite direction against hair-like nerve cells located at the end of the tube. This gives us a sensation of motion. With three canals placed at right angles to each other, we are equipped to detect motion in any direction. It is the erratic intermittent stimulation of the hair cells in the ear that gives the feeling of motion sickness.
As fluid moves through three canals simultaneously, contradictory nerve impulses reach the brain. In itself, this can cause significant disequilibrium. However, it’s made even worse if familiar cues to orientation are upset. For example, if you read while riding in a car, the inner ear detects the movement, but the eyes see only the static page of print. The conflicting signals are the catalyst for motion sickness.
So next time someone says your nausea is all in your head, in a way, you’ll have to agree.
Our bodies are amazing singularities. We have so many organs, yet they all work together in concert allowing us to sense and interact with the world around us. As we’ve seen, when different organs send conflicting information to the brain we can become ill. Looking out the car window will often help settle the stomach of someone suffering motion sickness, because it harmonizes the sensory perceptions.
Our bodies have five modes through which we perceive and connect with the physical world: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. But “reality” comprises more than the physical realm and so has other “senses” beyond the physical. While these things are harder to pin down, we’ve all experienced the “sense” that someone likes us or not. We know what it is to “sense” foreboding or dread. We “sense” that something is “the right thing (or wrong thing) to do.”
Sometimes these are collected under a general term: intuition. Through it, we relate to our environment in a way that transcends the five physical senses. Even scientists devoted to studying the physical universe follow their “hunches.” So this isn’t the sole realm of poets and philosophers.
When we move into the truly spiritual realm, our physical senses have a role to play, but they are not the whole story. Your five senses are not a great deal of help in gathering data about making an ethical decision. They aren’t of much use when deciding which of several spiritual paths to take.
Some, of course, dismiss the spiritual realm altogether. For them, reality consists of matter and energy and the interrelation between the two. But that doesn’t answer all of our questions. It doesn’t fully explain how different individuals observing the same “reality” see quite different things.
God made us with both physical and spiritual senses. To get the greatest advantage out of them as we seek to discover our world, we use them together. It’s potentially misleading to ignore one and depend completely on the other. Just as depending on one physical sense (sight) to tell us if we are moving may not give us an accurate description of reality. So depending entirely on our physical senses and disregarding the spiritual ones will give us a distorted picture.
David Humphreys and Ron Hughes
