The Last Word On Nothing

If anything bolsters our instinctive revulsion to game-changing technology, it’s that so much of it makes us physically queasy. Much of our experienced technology involves sensory conflicts that inadvertently activate an ancient digestive reflex. Since the first mariner failed to find his sea legs, the story of human limit-pushing has been one big barf-fest. There’s illness in response to inertial motion: carsickness, plane sickness, space sickness and roller coaster sickness. Riding on camels and elephants will do it, with the low-frequency oscillation of their gait. But the word ‘nausea’ shares its Greek roots with ‘nautical’, and originally referred to seasickness. An urge to hurl may even await someone travelling only slightly faster than nature intended.

All I wanted to do this weekend was to slide down a stupid mountain in Davos, Switzerland. Many possibilities occurred to me on the lift train to the top of the ski hill – that I would crash and find out whether I had any kind of health coverage here, that I would be shown up by my client’s expert skier of a nine-year-old daughter, that I would make a wrong turn and have to bust out my horrendous German. What I did not expect was to be heaving Bircher muesli into the snow on the second run.

The sensation evolved to expel neurotoxins from the body is also a great noticer of disconnects. Inner ear cues are averaged over a few seconds, to make sure that gravity does in fact point downward and equal roughly 1 g. If sights don’t match vestibular cues, a central nervous system malfunction is assumed, and vomit is not far behind.

Technology has disconnected our movement from walking speeds and our mental worlds from physical reality. Our minds may find convincing the illusion of normality, but nausea remains a stubborn gauge of artificiality. Virtual environments are ever more viscerally convincing, and video game developers face a tough challenge balancing verisimilitude with simulator sickness, a type of visually-induced motion sickness. Gamers routinely suffer – sometimes for hours after they stop playing – from a dizziness caused by shoot-em-up action with a lack of accompanying kinesthetic motion. The post-gaming vertigo may be a form of mal de debarquement, the sailor’s return to land after having devalued the contribution of his vestibular and visual systems.

Chemotherapies can’t hide their poisonous natures from our upchuck system (that’s the technical term). Hormone-based drugs regularly leave us retching. Then there’s technology whose sole purpose is to make people regurgitate their lunch. Riot police use of emetics in crowd control strikes me as a really dirty trick, but it sure is effective.

As I staggered off the lift and down the slope, whiteout conditions at the summit meant that none of the terrain below my skis threw up any visual contrast. Stealth moguls blended into the blowing snow and caught my skis at inconvenient angles.

When the snowboarder in front of me suddenly got shorter, I braced myself for a drop-off. I started gasping, uncomfortably warm – I wondered whether I had forgotten my breathing. Fear tunneled my senses, rendering me even less able to keep tabs on any kind of horizon. And then I puked. According to the literature, the only thing for it is a course of progressive desensitization, in an anxiety-reducing setting. More skiing in the fog, possibly with a coach who explains exactly what my proprioceptive cues are lying about. No thanks. Taking a wider stance — with my skis farther apart — should help with the nausea too, but ultimately, it won’t help me get down the hill.