Posted on 01/27/2011 6:24:17 AM PST by decimon
Everybody who has been aboard a ship has heard the advice: if you feel unsteady, look at the horizon. For a study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers measured how much people sway on land and at sea and found theres truth in that advice; people aboard a ship are steadier if they fix their eyes on the horizon.
Thomas A. Stoffregen of the University of Minnesota has been studying body sway for decadeshow much people rock back and forth in different situations, and what this has to do with motion sickness. In just a normal situation, standing still, people move back and forth by about four centimeters every 12 to 15 seconds. Stoffregen and his coauthors, Anthony M. Mayo and Michael G. Wade, wanted to know how this changes when youre standing on a ship.
To study posture at sea, Stoffregen made contact with the U.S. consortium that runs scientific research ships. Im really an oddball for these folks, because theyre studying oceanography, like hydrothermal vents. Heres this behavioral scientist, calling them up, he says. He boards a ship when it is travelling between different projectsfor example, in this study, he rode on the research vessel Atlantis as it went between two points in the Gulf of California. It had nothing to do with the fact that I like cruising near the tropics, he jokes. Since the ships are between scientific expeditions, he can sleep in one of the empty bunks normally reserved for ocean scientists, and crew members volunteer to take part in his study.
(Excerpt) Read more at psychologicalscience.org ...
Sober sailor ping.
>> Everybody who has been aboard a ship has heard the advice: if you feel unsteady, look at the horizon.
It’s pretty hard to look at the horizon when you’re throwing up.
Well, that’s good. It’s always nice to see controlled studies confirm what people have known for centuries.
>> if you feel unsteady, look at the horizon
What do submarine sailors do?
Horrible things.
OK how does this work again?
When I went through survival school with the USAF, they mentioned that if you were getting sea-sick on the emergency raft, to slide over the side and float in the water. Apparently that has a calming effect on you, and the sea-sickness goes away. Granted, it's considerably easier to do this over a life raft than it is a larger boat/ship.
Go down on long black tubes filled with seamen.
“Its pretty hard to look at the horizon when youre throwing up.”
Especially from both ends at the same time ! Lost 10 pounds in 4 hours once .
So how much did this ‘decades of study’ cost us?
This has been known for years.
Wonder if he has a study that confirms that drunks sway.......
Here’s a fun game I like to play on a ship:
Get a bunch of drunk people together on the fore deck and tell them to stand with their feet together while looking out across the bow of the ship.
Now if you do this on a sailboat that is 360 feet long in 12 foot seas, it gets real hilarious, real quick.
The only people who make it are snowboarders and surfers.
You don’t want to know...
If thousands of sailors have been doing this for centuries, doesn't this suggest that it is, in one sense, highly intuitive? In an unsteady situation, don't you always orient yourself towards the steadiest thing you can find?
I have a feeling that, for Stoffregen, "intuition" means "the first stupid idea that comes into your head without validation by a many-degreed psych-geek
Open a window for fresh air ;-)
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