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 Unsightly Electrical Discharge
by Patrick Clapp
 My father was a pilot and a dentist. I know he was one of the ~2% of the population that does not have wisdom teeth in his genetic makeup. I can assume that he had an iron stomach and a steady hand. Of those three gifts, he only gave me one. Fortunately, I, also, do not have wisdom teeth. Unfortunately, I suffer from motion sickness. Also, I sneeze in bright light, but that is only partially his fault.
Motion sickness is an accepted, although scientifically limp, catch-all term for that wish-you-were-anywhere-else feeling in the pit of your stomach brought on by air, sea, or car travel (or the teacups ride at your local "amusement" park). The feeling is brought on by a threefold increase in the electrical rhythms in the muscles of the stomach. The increase in activity in those muscles is caused by the wonderful world of stress hormones. The production of stress hormones is caused by confusion in the brain, and the confusion in the brain is caused by signal disparity between input from the eyes and input from the inner ear.
The inner ear has several components that form a balance center, an input cluster that bundles information pertaining to balance, equilibrium, and coordination. This balance center is affected by forces such as gravity and sudden linear accelerations. The eye, on the other hand, transmits data based on visual cues and frame of reference dependent upon your location. When the two units send conflicting information to the brain, such as the winding and weaving of a back country road versus the stationary interior of your friend's car, and confusion. My stomach is sort of rolling around thinking about the science of it all.
The Encyclopedia Britannica has the following sequential progression to offer:
The brain becomes confused by these contradictory messages from different sensory receptors. In response, it stimulates the production of abnormally large amounts of the stress hormones epinephrine, norepinephrine, and vasopressin. After a few more minutes of exposure to motion, electrical rhythms in the muscles of the stomach accelerate markedly from a normal three cycles per minute to as much as nine per minute. By this time the visible symptoms of motion sickness are well advanced, and feelings of nausea may culminate in vomiting.
Once you start feeling the effects, your brain is already dumping out enough stress hormones to cause you problems. Breaking the input cycle by closing your eyes or gouging out your inner ear will help. Reading exacerbates the problem for me, as does heat. Cold helps, which makes me think that the stress hormones in question lose their functionality in cold or the stomach muscles become less responsive. Perhaps a cold washcloth directly on the stomach might lessen the symptoms. Regardless, it is not a feeling I enjoy, although the reality of my weakness does afford me shotgun on many a road trip.
Wisdom teeth - you either have them or you do not. If you have them, your dentist either accepts their angle of entry or not. In the case of sneezing in sunlight, again your eyes, not your dentist are at fault; specifically, your optic nerves.
Sometimes, when some people walk exit the shadows or pass out through the in door, the sudden onset of direct sunlight causes them to sneeze. This may happen to you, it may not. Likely it has happened to someone in your presence. The explanation for this physiological occurrence is much easier to regale than the ravings of a senile hippocampus (with, at this point, the pointed mental image juxtaposition of the old man chasing kids of his front lawn and the easily confused organ buried in the basement of the brain). The design deficiency, in this case, comes from cheap parts and hasty labor (since when have you heard of a design perfected in three days).
Sneezing in sunlight is brought on by a sequence of events initiated by poor reaction time, perpetrated by poor electrical properties, and realized by, once again, unappreciated due diligence to false messages. The pupils constrict in bright light, however, the process is not instantaneous. Subsequently, the rods and cones at the back of your eye receive a large stimulus when moving rapidly from shadow into direct sunlight. They fire a correspondingly large electrical signal down your optical nerve toward your brain. And here is where it all goes wrong. The optic nerve, as it turns out, is a poor electrical insulator. The electrical bleed of that luminous burst dissipates rapidly as it leaks outward from the optic nerve. For some of us, nothing happens. For others, the sensory receptor packages at the roof of our noses are close enough to the optic nerve that the electrical discharge initiates a trigger in the sinuses. The brain receives that impulse shortly thereafter and, as it is programmed to, initiates a sneeze. Typically, the reaction consists of one short, sharp sneeze, as thereafter your pupils have restricted the light intensity reaching your photoreceptors.
Motion sickness does not hit everyone (unfortunately) and many folk are not afflicted with sneezing in sunlight. For those of us that suffer the first, puns aside, I feel for you, and I wonder if I would rather have had to deal with wisdom teeth in trade for not suffering as well. As for the second, it is only one sneeze, but, coming unexpectedly, it still leaves you to fend off the sudden faux concern of others. Next time it happens, just wave vaguely in direction of the offered blessings and tell them no, no, I am not sick, it's just an unsightly electrical discharge.
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