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Over the weekend a couple of friends and I made a trip to KOP, in a rush and too lazy to put all the seats up in the back of the van we all decided we would sit in the back on the ground. After about 5 minutes one of my friends began to feel nauseous and informed us that she experiences motion sickness. This is something that I am used to from my sister whom regardless of how smooth or straight forward a drive may be she would some point in the trip have to vomit. This became something that was expected from her always and became a fighting point amongst the rest of the family—as none of us wanted to sit next to her in the car or in the plane. It was interesting because I remember that any time someone in my family became motion sick we would blame them for “eating too much” or for falling asleep and not keeping their eye on the road. Reading over Hiro Takahashi’s webpaper Another Explanation for Hallucination during Sleep Paralysis: Mismatch between Brain’s Expectation and Sensory Input, it was proposed how motion sickness results from the mistracking of the sensory information in the brain. This brain confusion requires a high level of serotonin. Nausea and vomiting in a moving vehicle result from the mismatch in the brain. I guess this may also explain why some individuals complain of headaches or nausea when reading a book in a moving vehicle too. Now I realized that the symptoms of a headache, nausea and vomiting that take place in a moving vehicle is because the set of different sensory inputs do not match with any of the previously stored neural patters and the brain automatically interprets this mistracking as the effects of neurotoxins. Would these neurotoxins be defined as aliens to the several small boxes that make up our nervous system? If this is the case then why is it that motion sickness is not a symptom that everyone suffers from?

As a response to these supposedly neurotoxins the brain triggers vomiting as a defense mechanism to expel the “poisons from the stomach” in which the toxins have possibly entered with food”—this is the common system of vomiting that may result from food poisoning or some sort of flu. However when the mismatch happens in the brain, the alarmed brain misunderstands that some poisonous agents have entered the stomach, and it probably signals to release more serotonin to induce vomiting so that the toxin will exit the body.

This is thus a result of mismatching between the brain's expectations and sensory input--and can be related to the motion sickness people may experience from roller coaster rides or virtual dimension games.