"Should I wear a lobster bib?" I ask, stomach churning in anticipation.
"Here's a barf bag," replies Dr. Joel Ventura, a research scientist at Brandeis University's Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory. Before handing it over, he tests the bag's integrity by inflating it. "Sometimes they've got holes," he explains. "Once a subject got sick in his bag and it went straight through to his trousers. But don't worry. I'm not planning to make you vomit. That would interfere with the measurements I want to take."
On a nearby bulletin board, Ventura and his colleagues have pinned a smattering of articles on motion sickness and related topics, including a piece on the challenges of sexual intercourse in a weightless environment. Why couldn't I have volunteered for that experiment?
Instead, I'm seat-belted into what looks like a dentist's chair from hell. Two tennis balls suspended on rods hover 8" from my temples. Soon I'll be spinning around at 7 rpm for about an hour, all the while bobbing my increasingly disoriented noggin in a variety of bamboozling directions. The goal: to find out if one of the supposedly most potent seasickness preventatives works.
Spin Doctor
For the past 11 hours, a small adhesive patch behind my right ear has been leaching something into my bloodstream. It might be scopolamine, an anti-nausea agent that could keep my stomach contents where they belong. Or it might be a placebo leaching a whopping dose of nothing.
Before the torture begins, Ventura explains today's protocol, which parallels his earlier tests on 78 volunteers. First, he'll start the motorized spinning of the Bárány chair, which takes its name from the 1914 Nobel Laureate, Robert Bárány, a pioneer on the workings of the inner ear. His chair is one of the most effective ways to produce motion sickness.
After a minute of spinning, my inner ears should adapt to the motion. Then I'll begin sequential head movements: chin to chest then back to the head rest; right temple to right tennis ball then back; left temple to left tennis ball then back. I must repeat this cycle four times, followed by 50 seconds of rating my possible symptoms-nausea, sweating, salivation, drowsiness, headache, and dizziness.
