• Research Findings

    The connection between motion and infrasound is a discovery made by our company and is still relatively unknown. Once this fundamental law of motion in atmosphere gains recognition, the root cause of a number of effects on humans will become readily explainable, such as the effect of motion sickness symptoms being induced as a result of infrasound exposure. Infrasound exposure without motion leads to a sensory conflict, the established cause of motion sickness. A sensory conflict occurs when sensory inputs from one or more senses conflict with other sensory inputs. Since infrasound is and has always been associated with motion in an atmosphere, sensory detection of infrasound without other motion cues will cause sensory conflict in some people, leading to motion sickness symptoms.

This can be most readily understood by recognizing that since the millions of years man has been walking the earth, he has been exposed to infrasound in synchronism with his steps or gait (motion). As each step is taken during walking, our head and torso actually varies in elevation above the ground by more or less +/- one centimeter or so. Atmospheric physics dictates that this must cause a variation in the barometric pressure around our head and torso of about +/- 0.12 Pascal’s (about 75dB infrasound), and it will always be in synchronism with the acceleration forces sensed by the vestibular system as we walk and in conjunction with visual input. The frequency of this infrasound will be at the frequency of our step rate of around 1 cycle per second or so.

Exposure to infrasound at about this frequency alone may therefore directly result in sensory conflict in people who are sensitive to pressure changes, since the acceleration, visual and somatosensory stimulations normally also present with cyclic

pressure fluctuations are absent, which based on the previous discussion is defined as sensory conflict, the widely accepted cause of motion sickness and Sopite Syndrome. Sopite Syndrome symptoms can include sleep disruptions, drowsiness, fatigue, vertigo, headache, confusion and at the extreme, nausea and vomiting.

In a paper published in March 2014 titled: Significant Infrasound Levels A Previously Unrecognized Contaminant In Landmark Motion Sickness Studies (ASA publication 2 below), we demonstrated that a model based on infrasonic barometric pressure fluctuations alone, predicted the Motion Sickness Incidence with about the same accuracy as a much more complex model based on vertical acceleration. This finding shows quite clearly that what is normally identified as vertical motion sickness can be attributed to infrasound exposure alone in some people, and is supported by a scientifically controlled experimental study described in a Ph.D thesis by David Nussbaum (1985).

References

In a Paper presented at the 5th international conference on wind turbine noise in Denver Colorado in August 2013, Authored by Dr. Paul Schomer, John Erdreich, James Boyle and Pranav Pamidinghantam titled: A proposed theory to explain some adverse effects of the infrasonic emissions at some wind turbine farm sites.

It was shown that the probability that sensitivity to motion sickness and sensitivity to wind turbine acoustic emissions are unrelated is less than 2 in 1,000,000.

In a report titled: Some individual differences in human response to infrasound authored by D.S. Nussbaum and S. Reinis (1985) Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Ontario and Institute for Aerospace Studies, University of Toronto, Ontario. The authors reported many physiological findings in the 60 subjects exposed to 30 minutes of 130dB infrasound at 8 Hz with no effects observed in the 20 control subjects.

The authors also stated (about a minority of the test subjects) in this extensive report (41 pages plus 13 pages of graphical data):

The adverse responses of some individuals closely resemble motion sickness. Individual differences in the reaction to infrasound may then be explained by variability of inner ear structure or central adaptive mechanisms.

 

 

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“Acoustic interaction as a primary cause of infrasonic spinning mode generation and propagation from wind turbines”, authored by Kevin A Dooley, and Andy Metelka, and presented at the 166th meeting on acoustics in San Francisco CA in December 2013. The paper was published on January 14, 2014
The paper describes a mechanism through which infrasound emissions from wind turbines may be generated and propagated into the far field. A mathematical model is provided which predicts the magnitudes of the infrasound at any distance. Data presented from measurements compare favourably to the predictions at both 500 meters and 125km.

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“Significant infrasound levels a previously unrecognized contaminant in landmark motion sickness studies”, authored by Kevin A. Dooley presented at the 166th meeting on acoustics in San Francisco CA in December 2013.
The paper demonstrates that the infrasound that will result from vertical motion in an atmosphere can be used to accurately predict Motion Sickness Incidence (MSI), ignoring the motion parameters themselves. The infrasound levels were back calculated by establishing the vertical deflections the approximately 2000 test subjects were subjected to, using the acceleration and frequency data provided by the report titled: Motion Sickness Incidence: Exploratory studies of Habituation, Pitch and Roll and the refinement of a mathematical model, by Michael McCauley et al (1976).

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