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by philjohn 864 days ago
I'm one of those people.

I commute 50 mins each way on a Pendolino in the UK (into and out of London) and find that if I'm doing work on my laptop, or responding to emails on my phone as the train tilts I feel uncomfortable and dizzy.

The "slow" Desiro trains that don't tilt take 2 minutes longer to get into London, because whilst their top speed is 15Mph lower they accelerate faster.

1 comments

Do you still feel uncomfortable if you cannot see outside the train at all (i.e. not even in peripheral vision)? My understanding was that the effect was caused by the scenery outside the window moving in a way that's incommensurate with what your sense of balance is telling you.
It's connected to how our attention works. Attention is very much tied to vision and, for instance, if you are rotating around your central axis (like a Sufi) and can manage not to focus visually on anything around you and do some "proprioceptive attention adjustments", you can keep spinning for quite a long time w/o getting dizzy. Of course you'll have to slow down slowly rather than just abruptly stop the rotation.
It tends to be better if I look out the window, it's the looking at a screen and my inner ear sensing the movement that mucks me up I think.

Interestingly, I don't get motion sickness in VR, which is the opposite problem (movement visually, none in reality).