Music might soothe your soul — but could it also stop you from hurling on the highway?
A new study suggests that the right tunes might help fight off motion sickness, while others could leave you queasy, sweaty and reaching for a barf bag.
That’s no small thing: about 1 in 3 Americans are highly susceptible to carsickness, but nearly everyone will experience it at some point in their lifetime.
“Motion sickness significantly impairs the travel experience for many individuals, and existing pharmacological interventions often carry side-effects such as drowsiness,” Dr. Qizong Yue of China’s Southwest University, who co-authored the study, said in a statement.
“Music represents a non-invasive, low-cost, and personalized intervention strategy,” he added.
But before you blast your favorite playlist, be warned: the sadder the song, the sicker you might get.
In the study, Yue and his team recruited 30 carsick-prone volunteers and strapped them into a nausea-inducing driving simulator.
Each of the participants wore a cap wired with 64 electrodes to monitor their brain activity during the experiment.
When the queasiness kicked in, they were split into four groups, each listening to a different style of music for 60 seconds. A control group was played no music, letting their symptoms fade naturally.
The scientists found that upbeat music was the top cure — easing motion sickness by a whopping 57.3%.
Soft tunes weren’t far behind, cutting symptoms by 56.7%, while passionate music helped by 48.3%.
But sad songs fell flat. That group saw just a 40% drop — which was 3.3% worse than the group that didn’t listen to anything at all after feeling sick.
“Based on our conclusions, individuals experiencing motion sickness symptoms during travel can listen to cheerful or gentle music to achieve relief,” Yue said.
Brainwave data backed it up.
The electrode caps revealed a drop in complex activity in the occipital lobe — the part of the brain that processes visuals and plays a key role in motion sickness — whenever participants felt queasy.
The better the participants said they felt, the more their brain activity in the region bounced back.
Researchers theorized that soft music soothes nausea and dizziness by easing tension and calming the brain. Joyful tunes, meanwhile, activate the brain’s reward system, helping distract from discomfort.
Sad songs, on the other hand, might have the opposite effect — stirring up negative feelings and making recovery harder than if you hadn’t listened to anything at all, they suggested.
“The primary theoretical frameworks for motion sickness genesis apply broadly to sickness induced by various vehicles,” Ye said. “Therefore, the findings of this study likely extend to motion sickness experienced during air or sea travel.”
But he stressed more research is needed to confirm if music can really ease your discomfort on the road.
“The primary limitation of this study is its relatively small sample size,” Ye said, noting that all participants were also between 20 and 30 years old.
Plus, the study used a driving simulator, not real roads, which could affect how motion sickness and brain activity actually play out.
In future studies, Ye and his team plan to test more people and take the experiments out on real roads to see if the simulator results hold up.
They also want to find out if personal music taste affects which tunes work best to curb carsickness.
This isn’t the first time researchers have zeroed in on the ears as a way to fight motion sickness.
Earlier this year, Japanese researchers unveiled “sound spice,” a new treatment that uses a unique sound wave to stimulate the inner ear, easing nausea and dizziness.
“The effective sound level falls within the range of everyday environmental noise exposure, suggesting that the sound technology is both effective and safe,” said lead researcher Takumi Kagawa.
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