Why are your eyes spinning?
I turned a recent trip to Hollywood Studios in Orlando with the kids into an educational experience. I was on a ride with my son that involved sitting in a chair and spinning. It was hard keeping the camera steady but this is what happened alex-nystagmus . You can clearly see that his eyes are deviating while he is spinning. Why does this happen?
Each of our inner ears has a set of three balance canals that represent three dimensional space. Each is hardwired to a set of eye muscles so that if one canal is activated it will cause eye deviation to that side. Another example of the reflex is shown here were a patient is wearing infrared goggles and is moving his head. His inner ear senses it and tries to make corrective movements vestibulo-ocular-reflex
This reflex allows us to maintain a steady gaze at an object as we move around. For example as we walk the height of our head goes up and down. The vestibulocular reflex makes subtle corrections so that the world looks steady as we walk. People that have weak inner ears suffer from a disorder called osscilopsia. The world bounces as they walk. They have trouble , for example, driving and reading a traffic sign.
The reflex is also responsible for why we develop vertigo. Vertigo by definition is a hallucination of motion. It is caused by one ear telling our brain that we are moving even if we are not. This can be caused by an inner ear infection or anything that disturbes the delicate balance between the two ears. The ear tells our eyes to move and we see the world as spinning.
When our inner ears and our eyes do not agree as to what is going on we get a different feeling called seasickness. This happens when we are on a boat and looking at the boat. Our poor ears are telling us that we are moving (which we are relative to gravity) but our eyes are telling us that we are stationary (which we are relative to the boat). Our brains cannot resolve this and we feel ill. The best way to cure sea or car sickness is to look out over the horizon or any other place outside of the vessel that we are in.