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I am curious to learn more about the details of the nausea reaction we discussed in class this week. As we talked about on Tuesday, when you’re driving the car, the nervous system is producing corollary discharge signals that set up the expectations. Furthermore, the less disagreement between the signals, the less likely you are to get sick. This seems logical to me; our body wants an agreement between the internal signals of our nervous system (the corollary discharge) and the external sensory inputs. When they do not align, it is very interesting that the body reacts by inducing a feeling of discomfort. If it’s really bad, we even expel the contents of our stomach, perhaps eliminating a toxin we may have ingested. What a brilliant evolutionary acquisition. But we also talked about how it is a failed adaptive process. I wonder if there is any way to alter how the nervous system constantly adjusts its expectation. If the adjustment is successful, we don’t get sick (and vice versa). Well how does the nervous system adjust its expectations? Do all adjustments occur with the same frequency and rate? When someone gets their “sea legs,” does that mean that they have gotten very adept at making these adjustments or rather is it that they don’t adjust at all and have started to suppress the mechanism that checks expectations against sensory input?

So if this whole thing is going on constantly, why is it that we evolved to do this process largely without involvement of the i-function? In other words, why is it that the i-function plays such a removed role in this complicated and constant event? I suppose this is just one of many events that occur constantly without our conscious consent. But can we override this? As in, if we tried to take a deliberate stance against getting seasick (and tried to consciously accept the disagreement between corollary discharge signals and sensory input), could we successfully suppress the impending seasickness? I don’t think so…at least I’ve never seen anyone succeed at this route.

Also, I’m interested to learn more about the setpoints that our nervous system creates. I am writing about firewalking for my web paper, and it appears that setpoints are the key “trick” to walking on fire.