If you’re the kind of traveler who gets queasy on winding roads, science has a simple suggestion: change the soundtrack. In a new simulator study, researchers found that short bursts of music can help people bounce back from motion sickness – but not all tunes are created equal.

Soft and joyful tracks eased nausea the most, while sad music actually made motion sickness slightly worse than just sitting quietly.

Qizong Yue from Southwest University in China, together with colleagues, examined this issue in a recent study.

“Music represents a noninvasive, low-cost, and personalized intervention strategy,” Yue said.

Virtual roads, real queasiness

To test whether music can smooth rough rides, the team built a controlled carsickness challenge. First, 40 volunteers tried out different virtual routes in a high-fidelity driving simulator so the researchers could lock in a course that reliably provoked nausea.

From there, the team recruited 30 people who said they were moderately prone to carsickness and fitted them with EEG caps to record brain activity.

Participants completed a baseline rest, drove the nausea-inducing route, and rated how they felt. As soon as they stopped, most were randomly assigned to hear one of four musical moods for 60 seconds – soft, joyful, passionate, or sad.

A comparison group recovered in silence. A separate “no-nausea” group had their drives halted at the first hint of discomfort. Their EEG data provided a clean yardstick for what brain activity looks like when symptoms never developed.

Soft music eases nausea

The results were strikingly consistent. Joyful tracks delivered the biggest lift, cutting self-reported carsickness by 57.3 percent.

Soft music was a hair behind at 56.7 percent. Passionate, high-energy songs helped, too, but less so, bringing symptoms down by 48.3 percent. Simply resting reduced nausea by 43.3 percent.

Sad music was the outlier. It trimmed symptoms by only 40 percent – meaning it slightly underperformed quiet rest. That gap suggests downbeat tunes may amplify negative emotions or bodily focus at exactly the wrong time, nudging queasiness to linger.

Brain scans reveal sickness patterns

The EEG recordings backed up what people reported. When participants felt sick, activity patterns in the occipital lobe – the brain’s visual processing hub – became less complex, a sign the system wasn’t handling sensory input normally. As participants felt better, those patterns rebounded toward baseline.

That fits long-standing theories that motion sickness arises when the brain struggles to reconcile visual cues with signals from the inner ear. The better the brain resynchronizes, the faster the stomach settles.

Why would specific musical moods help? The team points to two plausible pathways. Gentle tracks likely dial down anticipatory tension, which is known to speed the onset and severity of symptoms.

Joyful songs may also recruit the brain’s reward systems and shift attention outward, breaking the loop of hyperawareness that makes every bump feel worse.

By contrast, sad music pulls attention inward and can heighten discomfort – the opposite of what a woozy traveler needs.

Music strategies for travelers

For people who dread winding highways, this is welcome news. The intervention is short, simple, and easy to try. In the study, a single minute of music right after driving stopped was enough to move the needle.

In a real car or bus, you might cue up a gentle or upbeat track the moment symptoms flicker, and let it play while you steady your breathing and look toward a stable point on the horizon.

Headphones can help you control the soundscape even if everyone else is chatting or the radio is blaring something moodier.

“The primary theoretical frameworks for motion sickness apply broadly to sickness induced by various vehicles,” Yue said, adding that the benefits of cheerful or gentle music likely extend to air and sea travel.

Music therapy needs more testing

Like any early-stage experiment, this one has limits. The sample was small, and the “cars” were virtual; a simulator can’t reproduce every jolt, smell, and distraction of a real road. Musical taste also varies widely, and the study didn’t tailor playlists to individual preferences.

The researchers want to validate EEG patterns as an objective marker of carsickness in larger groups, repeat the work outside the lab, and test how personal favorites shape the effect.

Still, the core insight is both intuitive and empowering: the nervous system listens to what you play for it. If you’re prone to motion sickness, sound can be a gentle lever.

Keep a few soft or joyful tracks handy, skip the dirges, and give your brain every chance to resync before your stomach decides it’s time to revolt.

The research is published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

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