The Science Behind Why You Can’t Read in the Car

For many of us, carsickness is the bane of every automotive experience: It’s always there, preventing us from navigating with our phone or even reading a book to pass the time without the sudden onset of a headache, cold sweats, and crippling nausea. It’s like being hungover, but without the fun drinking part that precedes it.

What exactly is going on here? Why do some of us fall violently ill just by glancing at a book in a moving car, while others can read through an entire road trip without any problem at all? Here’s the scientific lowdown on what makes carsickness tick, as well as what you can do to prevent (or at least minimize) its wickedly brutal effects.

The Motion Sickness Mystery

These days, the prevailing belief is that motion sickness arises from a disagreement between your eyes’ visual input and your inner ear’s sense of acceleration and/or movement. For instance, if you’re in a plane that starts to bank sharply to the left, your inner ear tells you you’re moving even though your eyes tell you you’re clearly sitting still in your seat. The same holds true for reading a book in a car, and anyone who’s ever gotten motion sickness in a movie theater knows the opposite can be just as uncomfortable.

It’s not that simple, though (why would it be?): The scientific community still isn’t 100-percent convinced that sensory disagreement alone is responsible for the motion sickness people experience in cars (or boats, or planes), nor are they sure why nearly one third of us are more sensitive to it than others, or why women seem to get it more than men — there simply isn’t a consensus, and since nobody’s funneling millions of dollars into motion sickness research, definitive answers don’t seem close at hand.

Why Apple’s Push for Accuracy of Health Apps Is a Major Step in the Right Direction

It’s becoming increasingly easy to make a fitness and health tracking app these days. Don’t get me wrong — a killer mobile experience is a feat now that mobile users have surpassed those on desktop around the world. But frankly, the barrier to entry for mobile apps has been getting lower and lower over the past years. Today, we’ve arrived at an App Store chock full of healthcare apps (over 165k) — but the question remains: how many of these apps are actually legit?

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that Pokémon Go and its many alternatives don’t have a ton on the line in terms of accuracy or legitimacy. If they work and entertain, users are happy. But think about apps in the health space — fitness trackers, wellness monitors, medical diagnosis apps. If the rules and regulations for game apps are the same as those for health apps, there’s much more at stake — and much more room for serious danger to occur if these apps aren’t actually accurate.

Fortunately, in an effort to prevent this exact possibility, Apple has updated their App Store Review Guidelines, and health apps are under much more pressure to produce apps that actually work. Now, apps that have potential to cause physical harm, provide inaccurate data or information that could misdiagnose users will be under far stricter scrutiny. For many so called health and fitness wearable manufacturers, this could be bad news — but for consumers everywhere, I strongly believe that Apple’s push for greater accuracy in health apps is a big move in the right direction. It’s just the first of a series of steps required to make health technology more accurate and add value to our lives in a greater way.