Playing cheerful music can help kids get over their car sickness

By Stephen Beech

Cheerful music could help children get over car sickness quicker, according to new research.

Listening to happy tunes helped study participants with motion sickness recover better, say scientists.

But sad music helped less than doing nothing, according to the study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Motion sickness is a common condition that happens when you're in motion, such as riding in a car, while sitting still.

It happens when our eyes, inner ear and body send conflicting messages to the brain.

Symptoms include nausea, breaking out in cold sweat or headache.

Now, Chinese scientists studying ways of improving motion sickness have found that playing different types of music may help people recover more effectively.

Using a specially calibrated driving simulator, they induced car sickness in participants and then played different types of music while they tried to recover.

Soft and joyful music produced the best recovery effects, while sad tunes were less effective than doing nothing at all.

Study corresponding Dr. Qizong Yue, of Southwest University in China, said: “Motion sickness significantly impairs the travel experience for many individuals, and existing pharmacological interventions often carry side-effects such as drowsiness.

“Music represents a non-invasive, low-cost, and personalized intervention strategy.”

The researchers explained that feeling tense in anticipation of possible car sickness can trigger a physical reaction, bringing sickness on more quickly.

Because music can be used to alleviate tension, Dr. Yue and his team wondered if it could help people who get carsick.

The team began by developing a model to induce motion sickness.

They recruited 40 participants to screen routes on a driving simulator and select the best route for making people feel carsick.

The researchers then screened a group of participants for their previous susceptibility to carsickness and selected 30 who reported moderate levels of past carsickness.

The participants wore electroencephalogram (EEG) caps, to try to identify quantifiable signals of carsickness in the brain’s activity.

They were divided into six groups - four that received a music intervention, one that received no music, and one whose simulators were stopped when they started to report that they might feel slightly carsick.

The last group acted as a comparative sample for the EEG data.

They had received the same stimuli as the other 25 participants, but weren’t allowed to become nauseous, so the difference between their brain activity and the other participants’ should help identify signals characteristic of carsickness.

To begin with, the participants sat still in the simulator for a few minutes to capture EEG signals from their brains.

Then they performed a driving task and reported their level of carsickness to the research team.

Once they stopped driving, the participants in the music groups were played tunes for 60 seconds, and then asked to report how sick they felt.

The scientists found that joyful music alleviated carsickness the most, reducing it by 57.3%, very closely followed by soft music, at 56.7%.

Passionate music reduced motion sickness by 48.3%, while playing sad music turned out to be slightly less effective than doing nothing.

The control group reported a reduction of car sickness symptoms by 43.3% after their rest, while those who listened to sad music reported a reduction of just 40%.

The EEG data showed that participants’ brain activity in the occipital lobe changed when they reported carsickness.

The EEG measured less complex activity in this brain region when participants said they felt quite sick.

The better the recovering participants said they felt, the more the activity measured by the EEG returned to normal levels.

The researchers say it’s possible that soft music relaxes people, relieving tension that exacerbates carsickness, while joyful music might distract people by activating brain reward systems.

But sad music could have the opposite effect, by amplifying negative emotions and increasing overall discomfort.

The researchers say further work is needed to confirm the results.

Dr. Yue said: “The primary limitation of this study is its relatively small sample size.

“This constraint results in limited statistical power.”

He says more research with larger samples will be needed to validate EEG patterns as a quantitative indicator of motion sickness and to improve understanding of the impact of music on motion sickness.

The researchers plan to follow up the experiments with investigations of different forms of travel sickness and the role played by personal musical taste.

Dr. Yue said: “Based on our conclusions, individuals experiencing motion sickness symptoms during travel can listen to cheerful or gentle music to achieve relief."

He added: “The primary theoretical frameworks for motion sickness genesis apply broadly to sickness induced by various vehicles.

"Therefore, the findings of this study likely extend to motion sickness experienced during air or sea travel.”