Discovered this on a fairly bumpy flight, (gum is lousy for ear pressure imbalances but I carry it anyway). After that I began experimenting on others and it usually worked for them too.
Long ago I read somebody's theory (Bruce Chawin's, maybe?) that the reason so many poisons cause dizziness is that the inner ear is an extremely delicate mechanism and so is easily thrown off such that visual perception and positional sense no longer matches what the ear is saying. The theory further suggests that the brain is evolved to work that backwards: if the body is sufficiently dizzy, it has been poisoned, so it had better empty the stomach.
For me the trick is to keep motion perception in sync with the inner ear. So if I'm on a boat, I'll aim my head in the direction we're heading and think of myself as moving with the boat. Same thing with cars: on a bumpy or swervy taxi ride I'll look straight ahead and think of myself as moving with the car.
It sounds ridiculous, but it works well for me. Living in SF, I've had many chances to try it out.
At some point in late grade school I figured out it was a better use of my time to start "working the problem" rather than hold out for some folk wisdom to save me, from car sickness to sore throats (keep your neck warm to prevent laryngitis) and everything in between.
Hanging a hand out the window works much, much faster. Barring that, anything cold on the wrist will help, but it's hard to find the right spot while distressed. Air, window pane in the winter, ice, icepack (best runner up), or a can of soda.
I heard they experimented with lacing sheep carcasses with ipecac syrup in Africa to keep the lions away, and it worked. You remember - viscerally - what made you sick and you avoid eating it again.
30+ years later I still use that trick on the very rare occasion when I get motion sickness, and it still seems to work fine.
I know those work anecdotally (for me and others with whom I’ve been on boats). They were explained to me by an ENT dr during a sailboat race to Bermuda about 20 years ago. His explanation was that it was about aligning the different signals the brain gets during motion.
The headband sounds interesting. There’s few things I’ve experienced that are more miserable than extended motion sickness.
Onion tears are caused by 2 different chemicals held apart by the onion's cellular structure. Every time you cut an onion, the cells rupture and mix, aerosolization and making you cry when the acid gets into your eyes. A sharp knife (as mentioning in another comment) would help minimize the amount of cellular damage and therefor the gas produced. You can also wear goggles.
Everything else is bunk. From-A former professional chef and person particularly sensitive to onions. (I just learned to cut onions with my eyes closed)
Or even just contact lenses. At least for me it eliminates onion tears completely. I had been using them for at least a decade before I started to cook my own proper food, I'll never forget that one time I tried cutting up onions wearing my glasses instead...
I've known people who just have seemingly no reaction to onions whatsoever, and others who break into tears the second the first cut happens.
Going fast works.
If you're not a professional, using an onion comb (which costs less than $2 and lasts a lifetime) will change your onion-cutting experience. It lets you go way faster and therefore reduce the time you're exposed to tear-inducing chemicals (assuming you're cutting 1-2 onions and not cooking for a whole army).
It's likely that at least half of the effect of a sharp knife is due to time improvements too.
Don’t know why everything else would automatically be bunk.
If you refrigerate your onions, you might be fine for some amount of time and you'll be lessening damage and it's going to help but not solve it at volume (cut one onion, you're fine. Cut 100, not so much).
https://www.amazon.com/Sharper-Your-Knife-Less-You/dp/014311...
They must have a better way. And their way will work for 1 onion or 50!
It never ceases to amuse and sometimes amaze me how statements like this immediately arrest my attention to the thing I’ve not noticed at all. Now I’m only thinking about the shirt on my back, trying to notice it, and thinking of how I haven’t felt it since I first pulled it on this morning.
Here is the relevant information for those interested:
""Enter a young inventor named Samuel Owen, who has developed a prototype device called the OtoTech, from Otolith Labs. Worn on a headband behind the ear, it uses subtle vibrations to change the way the brain computes the fact that the body that it’s attached to is in motion. Early tests show it relieves motion sickness without the side effects of drugs, Owen said, though he admits the science is so young that it’s not clear just how.
The vibrations emanating from the OtoTech gently target two of the four fibers that carry data about body motion to the brain via a system of inner ear sensors called the vestibulocochlear nerve. “Two [of the four vestibulocochlear nerve fibers] go to the brain, two go to your reflexes,” Owen said. The trick is to affect the former and not the latter.
“The working hypothesis is that [the vibration] causes a chaotic and noninformative stimulus to go to the brain. Somewhere, probably the cerebellum, there’s a filtering mechanism that filters out noninformative sensed information. It’s the reason you don’t notice the shirt on your back right now,” he said.
In other words, while you remain consciously aware that you’re moving, the balance portion of your brain stops noticing the fact; the data has been drowned out in white noise from the device.""