Why does looking at my phone in the car make me feel sick?

Why does my phone make me carsick?

Have you ever tried to watch a video in the car, and ten minutes later your stomach feels awful? Then you look out of the window, and somehow you feel a bit better.

That is not your imagination. Two parts of your body are sending your brain two completely different reports.

Report one comes from your ears. Deep inside each ear are three tiny loops filled with liquid. When the car bumps and turns, that liquid sloshes around, and it tells your brain: "We are moving. We are wobbling."

Report two comes from your eyes. You are staring at your phone. The phone moves along with you, so on the screen everything looks perfectly still. Your eyes tell your brain: "We are not moving. Everything is steady."

One report says moving. The other says standing still. Your brain has no idea what to do with that.

Now here is the strange part. For almost all of human history, the only thing that made your senses disagree like this was poison. If you ate something bad, your senses would start to lie to you. So your brain keeps an ancient emergency plan: feel sick, sweat, throw up — and get the poison out.

Your brain is running that plan right now. It is not that you are weak. It is that your brain pressed the wrong button. That is also why the driver almost never feels sick: his hands are on the wheel, he knows which way the car will turn next, and his eyes and ears stay in agreement.

Try it yourself: Sit on a chair that spins. Close your eyes, spin ten times, then stop. Look down at a phone for five seconds. Then look up at something far away across the room. Which one feels worse? Looking down does — because you just made your eyes and your ears argue again.