John Golding, Professor of Applied Psychology, has been interviewed by BBC Hereford and Worcester about what causes motion sickness and why only some people experience it.
Professor Golding was interviewed for the ‘Ask Oscar’ segment of the programme which features experts answering listeners’ questions on different topics.
The question posed to Professor Golding, who is a leading expert in the field of motion sickness, was “what causes travel and sea sickness and why do only some people get it?”
In response, Professor Golding said: “It’s thought that the mechanism for all these things - air sickness, space sickness, virtual reality sickness – is called sensory conflict. That is when the information from your eyes - that visual world outside from your inner ear, which is your organ of balance, and…feelings from your hands, your feet, the joints - when they start to contradict each other. And this causes what’s called a sensory conflict or sensory mismatch which in turn triggers motion sickness.”
Speaking about why some people experience motion sickness more severely than others, Professor Golding added: “There are huge individual differences, and there are a number of reasons for that. One is age - the peak age for motion sickness is about eight or nine years old, very young babies don’t get motion sick. Then after about eight or nine years of age, you start to get less sensitive because you adapt through experience to your environments.
“Women are slightly more sensitive to motion sickness overall…and there are other things like if you…suffer from migraines, that’s a potentiating risk factor. And overall, genetic studies looking at the heritability of motion sickness indicate that it’s probably about 60-70% heritable. And you can find that [out] from twin studies and also from modern DNA techniques.”
Listen to the full interview on BBC Sounds.
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