Yakushin took hold of Perry’s head and began rocking it from side to side in time with the scale. Dai’s colleague, Sergei Yakushin, programmed a sequencer to play an ascending musical scale in seven seconds, and then go back down in another seven seconds. Dai told her to enter the chamber, a small octagonal room about six feet wide, and sit down. Both of these tests revealed the same frequency of motion: Perry’s internal deck was completing its rocking motion once every seven seconds.įinally Perry was ready for treatment. Next the doctors told Perry to sit down, strapped an accelerometer to her wrist, and asked her to move her arm in time with her perceived circular swaying motions. Perry stood on a Wii Balance Board that contains pressure sensors on a connected computer, Dai and a colleague watched Perry’s center of balance shift in a slow, clockwise circle. On Monday, during Perry’s first treatment session, Dai set out to measure her perceived motions. Since then he has received a stream of patients from all over the country. In July he published positive results showing that the treatment cured or substantially helped 70% of subjects. (The vestibulo-ocular reflex is tamped down in people who spin much more than normal, like figure skaters, one of the many ways the brain contributes to athletic performance.) Dai’s research suggests that, in people like Perry, the reflex adapted too well to the motion of the boat, and needs to be readapted to life on land. This reflex causes the eyes to move in the opposite direction of the head’s motion, a compensation tactic that allows a person to maintain focus on an object while her body is moving.
“I hope so much they can fix me.”ĭai’s method involves fixing the vestibulo-ocular reflex, the neural mechanism that stabilizes images on the retina when the head is in motion. “They’re going to put me in a magic spinning room,” she said wryly. So Perry, feeling desperate, flew to New York last week and paid $1,000 for the experimental treatment. Here neurologist Mingjia Dai thinks he has discovered not only the faulty mechanism behind Mal de Debarquement syndrome (the name is French for “disembarkation sickness”), but also the first therapy that treats it effectively. Their salvation may be found in a small, windowless lab at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. “I hope so much they can fix me.”īut there’s new hope for Perry and for others, like her, who are internally out to sea. Physical therapy didn’t do any good, and a prescription for Klonopin, a Valium-like drug that both reduces anxiety and suppresses the action of the vestibular system, only reduced her symptoms for short stretches. She had seen a succession of doctors, neurologists, and inner-ear specialists, but none of them could help. Perry grappled not just with daily discomfort, but also with the fear that something in her brain was permanently broken. Over the months, she discovered which activities made her disorientation worse: looking down (chopping vegetables and doing dishes became problematic), focusing on something close-up (ditto for reading), sitting still with her eyes closed (so much for meditating), and being under bright fluorescent lights (forget about grocery shopping). These feelings never stopped, and they completely disrupted her life. She also had the constant sensation that her body was swaying in a clockwise circular motion, as if she were balancing on an unsteady deck. Perry has felt the world bobbing beneath her feet for nearly four months now. Perry is one of those unlucky ones, a sufferer from the disorder rather poetically dubbed Mal de Debarquement syndrome. But in rare cases, and for mysterious reasons, the illusion persists for months or even years. For most people, the feeling vanishes within minutes or hours.
Many people have experienced this sensation after getting off a boat they may sway or stagger until their vestibular system re-adapts to stationary ground and they get their “land legs” back. But while standing in the Anchorage airport to catch her flight home to San Francisco, she suddenly felt the ground moving under her, undulating with the gentle rhythm of waves. Perry didn’t feel seasick at all during the rest of the cruise, and spent a happy week marveling at the glaciers. When she boarded the massive Norwegian Sun cruise ship, she felt “a little woozy and weird” from the boat’s gentle rocking, she remembers, but the sensation quickly faded. Last July, Chris Perry went on an Alaskan cruise with her family to celebrate her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.
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