Normally, I’d start this sort of article by saying something along the lines of, “Everyone knows how horrible it is to feel motion sick.” But that’s not entirely true—plenty of people can text, read, and do all sorts of things in a moving vehicle without feeling the slightest bit nauseous. If that sounds like you, you’ll have to trust me—a chronic sufferer of motion sickness—when I say that it wholeheartedly sucks.
Plus, many drugs used for motion sickness come with an unwanted side effect: drowsiness. While that’s useful for a long-haul red-eye, it definitely kills the mood on a road trip. That’s why researchers have looked into whether music can help people recover from carsickness, and they might be onto something.
“Motion sickness significantly impairs the travel experience for many individuals, and existing pharmacological interventions often carry side-effects such as drowsiness,” Qizong Yue, a researcher at Southwest University in China, said in a statement. “Music represents a non-invasive, low-cost, and personalized intervention strategy.”
Simulated carsickness hell
In a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Yue and colleagues induced carsickness in study participants with a driving simulator (you couldn’t pay me enough to get into that) and then played different types of music while monitoring them for potential recovery. According to their results, soft and joyful music best supported recovery. Perhaps surprisingly, even sad music was worse than doing nothing.
The team divided the 30 participants, who had reported moderate levels of previous carsickness, into six groups—four who listened to music as they recovered from motion sickness, one who didn’t, and one whose simulations stopped before the participant became carsick.
Everyone wore electroencephalogram (EEG) caps—tools that measure electrical activity in the brain. The researchers hoped to identify brain signals indicative of carsickness by comparing the neural activity of the first five groups with that of the sixth group—the one for which the simulation stopped before participants could become nauseous (ok, maybe you could pay me to be in group six).
The researchers first measured each participant’s EEG signals as they sat still in the simulator. The participants subsequently underwent a driving task and communicated their level of carsickness. At the end of the task, some participants listened to music for 60 seconds.
The team then asked them how carsick they still were. The participants reported that joyful music reduced carsickness by 57.3%, soft music reduced it by 56.7%, and passionate music by 48.3%. While those who didn’t listen to music reported 43.3% fewer carsickness symptoms after the 60 seconds, participants who listened to sad music reported a reduction of just 40%.
The researchers suggest that soft music might relax tensions that worsen carsickness, and joyful music may provide a distraction by triggering brain reward systems. Sad music could aggravate negative feelings and, as a result, worsen a person’s general discomfort.
Your brain when you’re motion sick
Interestingly, the EEG data revealed changes in participants’ occipital lobe brain activity when they said they were carsick. Specifically, the device recorded less complex activity when participants reported feeling significantly nauseous. As they recovered, brain activity in this area gradually returned to normal levels.
“Based on our conclusions, individuals experiencing motion sickness symptoms during travel can listen to cheerful or gentle music to achieve relief,” Yue explained. “The primary theoretical frameworks for motion sickness genesis apply broadly to sickness induced by various vehicles. Therefore, the findings of this study likely extend to motion sickness experienced during air or sea travel.”
However, “the primary limitation of this study is its relatively small sample size,” the researcher added. “This constraint results in limited statistical power.” What’s more, one’s brain might react differently to a simulation than real-life conditions. In other words, more research with larger samples is needed to confirm both the carsickness brain activity patterns and to continue investigating the impact of music on motion sickness.
Moving forward, the team will study different types of motion sickness and the influence of music taste. And if any of the researchers are reading this article, I’d like to suggest investigating the anecdotal evidence of how singing helps prevent and/or recover from motion sickness. It would finally prove to my family that I literally need to belt out the lyrics to all of Taylor Swift’s songs when we hit those windy roads.
