Apr. 14--Max Levine seems like a nice guy. But then you look at what he does to people.

Levine, an assistant professor of psychology at Siena College, studies nausea. He is particularly interested in how emotions, memory and mental state influence the sensation.

So Levine places perfectly healthy college students into a contraption designed to make them feel ill.

"It sounds sadistic, but its ideal for isolating nausea from all other medical conditions," he said.

His test subjects sit on a stool, and a metal cylinder spins around them. The interior is painted white with vertical stripes of black tape. Levine experimented with how fast to spin the drum to create the maximum effect. He settled on a gentle twirl about the pace of a ceiling fan on low slow enough that the stripes are still distinct, but fast enough that you can barely focus. Essentially, Levine is using motion sickness as a tool to make his subject nauseous.

Almost everyone experiences nausea now and again, but it can be particularly overpowering for pregnant women, cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, people who suffer from a gastrointestinal disease, stress and depression. Levine hopes to find a cure for them.

"Nausea is defined in different ways by different people," Levine said. "Most people will say it has something to do with what's going on in their stomach. It's an unpleasant feeling."

The urge to vomit is a common complaint.

Levine asks his subjects to describe how they feel, but he also places electrodes on their skin to measure the objective symptoms: rapid breathing, sweaty palms and altered activity in the stomach.

After a meal, the stomach gets into a rhythm of three contractions per minute.

"It's a pretty slow muscular movement that seems to be ideal for digesting food," he said. "When a person reports nausea, however, it jumps all over the place. The stomach is sort of quivering like it doesn't know what it wants to do."

The jumbled contractions increase the opportunity for food to move backward in the wrong direction along the digestive tract, creating the urge to vomit.

Levine, who previously worked at Wake Forest University and studied at Pennsylvania State University, has been teaching at Siena for two years. More than 1,000 students have been through his nausea machine at Wake Forest and Penn State, and Siena students will soon have the experience for Levine's latest study of ginger's effect on nausea.

Levine has discovered some interesting things in his studies.

Test subjects who ate a high-protein meal before sitting in Levine's device fared well. Putting the controls of the spinning cylinder in their hands, and they did better.

"We related that to the feeling that they are the driver of the car," he said. "The driver doesn't ever seem to get motion sick. Perhaps this is because they feel they are in more control of the situation."

Predictability also helps. Telling them how long the test is going to last resulted in fewer complaints of nausea.

"There's this real mind-body connection, we think," Levine said.

Nausea kicks in when the body's stress system the sympathetic nervous system fires up. In addition to the visual stimulus of the spinning cylinder, the sympathetic system is influenced by emotions, memories and what people are thinking about, Levine said.

It may help explain why people who enjoy riding roller coasters don't get sick or why someone who had a bad experience with Southern Comfort can never drink it again.

Levine has found that triggering the parasympathetic nervous system quells feelings of nausea. The parasympathetic system is known as the "rest and digest" system. It helps growth and repair, digestion of food and is responsible for the slow breathing and slowing heart rate that precede sleep.

"If we can generate that feeling in people they seem to be protected from the development of (nausea) symptoms," he said.

So the next time you feel nauseous, try to mimic your parasympathetic system by breathing deeply or placing a cold cloth on your face. Both seem to help, according to Levine.

Still, this reporter tried her best to activate the parasympathetic system while sitting on Levine's stool as the cylinder rotated around her. Her eyes flicked back and forth, unable to focus on anything. Dizzy and disoriented, a sour feeling quickly grew in her stomach and her skin felt clammy. After a few minutes, it felt as if the cylinder was standing still and the reporter was spinning. She expressed her desire for the experiment to stop, and Levine complied.

He really is a nice guy, but this reporter will stick to roller coasters.

Causes of nausea

Motion sickness

Pregnancy

Chemotherapy

Stress

Depression

Physiological signs of nausea

Sweaty palms

Erratic electrical activity in the stomach

Increased heart rate

Rapid breathing

Methods for fighting nausea

Deep breathing

A cool cloth on face

Acupressure bands

High-protein meals

Feeling in control

Source: Max Levine, assistant professor of psychology, Siena College

Cathleen F. Crowley can be reached at 454-5348, or by e-mail at ccrowley@timesunion.com.

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Last updated: 05/01/2008 - 03:06 PM