Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

The Mind's Eye 265"You're staying put." Motion sickness is triggered by this mismatch, andthe standard treatments have you eliminate it: don't read; look out thewindow; stare at the horizon.Many astronauts are chronically space-sick, because there is no gravitationalsignal, a rather extreme mismatch between gravity and vision.(Space-sickness is measured in gams, a unit named after the Republicansenator from Utah, Jake Gam, who parlayed his position on the NASAappropriations subcommittee into the ultimate junket, a trip into space.Space Cadet Garn made history as the all-time champion upchucker.)Worse, spacecraft interiors do not give the astronauts a world-alignedframe of reference, because the designers figure that without gravity theconcepts "floor," "ceiling," and "walls" are meaningless, so they might aswell put instruments on all six surfaces. The astronauts, unfortunately,carry their terrestrial brains with them and literally get lost unless theystop and say to themselves, "I'm going to pretend that thataway is 'up,'thataway is 'forward,'" and so on. It works for a while, but if they lookout the window and see terra firma above them, or catch sight of a crewmatefloating upside down, a wave of nausea slams them. Space sicknessis a concern to NASA, and not only because of the decline in productivityduring expensive flight time; you can well imagine the complicationsof vomiting in zero gravity. It will also affect the burgeoning technologyof virtual reality, in which a person wears a wide-field helmetshowing a synthetic world whizzing by. Newsweek's assessment: "Themost barfogenic invention since the Tilt-a-Whirl. We prefer Budweiser."Why on earth—or space—should a mismatch between vision and gravityor inertia lead, of all things, to nausea? What does up-and-down have todo with the gut? The psychologist Michel Treisman has come up with aplausible though still unproven explanation. Animals vomit to expel toxinsthey have eaten before the toxins do further harm. Many naturally occurringtoxins act on the nervous system. This raises the problem faced byIngrid Bergman in Notorious: how do you know when you have been poisoned?Your judgment would be addled, but that would affect your judgmentabout whether your judgment has been addled! More generally, howcould a malfunction detector distinguish between the brains malfunctioningand its accurately registering an unusual situation? (Old bumpersticker: "The world is experiencing technical difficulties. Do not adjustyour mind.") Gravity, of course, is the most stable, predictable feature ofthe world. If two parts of the brain have different opinions about it,chances are that one or both is malfunctioning or that the signals they are