In the bowels of a brick building on the University of Minnesota's East Bank campus, a kinesiology professor uses his "moving room" to throw people off balance.
Made of crude materials, the small chamber consists of three large textured walls, one with a map of the United States fixed to it. During his studies, Prof. Thomas Stoffregen, director of the U's Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory, invites visitors to step onto a sensor inside the chamber. Suddenly, one of the walls zooms forward, forcing the test subject off balance.
Here, in this humble lab in the landlocked Midwest, Stoffregen has come up with a theory he hopes will turn what we know about motion sickness on its ear.
Scientists have long believed that the source of motion sickness lies inside the body — the inner ear, known as the organ of balance.
Stoffregen suggests otherwise.
He contends that when we enter a challenging environment — be it a boat, a roller coaster or the back seat of a car — it's poor posture control that causes us to get sick.
Our bodies are constantly swaying, whether we're conscious of it or not, he said. It's when we sway too much and lose our balance that motion sickness sets in.
"The way that you sway is predictive of whether you're susceptible to motion sickness," Stoffregen said.