If you’ve ever noticed you’re torn between films in flight, if you notice your favorite snacks are a little farther apart at 35,000 feet, or if you feel like a single cocktail hit you harder than on the ground than on the ground, the altitude can be held responsible.
The plane’s cabins are pressurized to mimic conditions around 6,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level. This means your body is more exposed to changes in the environment, such as cabin pressure, lower oxygen levels, and air dryers than most deserts. These conditions can change the way you experience food, emotions, and even alcohol, explains Dustin Hines, an associate professor of neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.
Are you likely to cry at cruising altitude?
Many travelers report becoming abnormally emotional while watching movies on planes, but this phenomenon is anecdotal. Clear scientific research has not proven a direct link between flying and growing crying.
Still, Hines believes that certain physiological changes during air travel can help explain them. He says low oxygen levels and lack of sleep (especially on long-distance flights that disrupt the body’s circadian rhythm) can impair the brain’s ability to regulate emotions. This is because the amygdala, part of the brain that processes emotions, and the prefrontal cortex, which causes reasoning and self-control, can fall out of synchronization under these conditions.
“When you look at the human emotional brain and change something, especially sleep and oxygen, you get something called a severing of the prefrontal cortex, which is an amygdala and the cortex of the prefrontal cortex that you are trying to understand everything.
In theory, this leads to the loss of emotional control, known in psychology as “emotional disinhibition,” which usually causes someone to cry if they don’t.
Is the food really different when you’re flying?
There is stronger scientific support for air travel interference with our sense of taste. A 2010 study by the German Fraunhofer Bill Institute of Physics, commissioned by German airline Luftanza, found that taste was declining at altitude.
The reason isn’t your taste buds, your brain explains Hines. Other research, he says, shows the connection between sound and taste processed on an island, an area of the brain that is involved in integrating sensory information and shaping how flavors are perceived. When on a plane, it can hover at a constant background noise – around 85 decibels, often roughly equivalent to noise created by a lawn mower or vacuum. This phenomenon is called “sonic seasonings.” It’s not all negative. Research has shown that muami’s taste can be enhanced during flight.
“What they suggest is that the cognitive load of loud sounds changes all these other stimuli,” says Hines.
Low humidity between 10 and 20% in most airplane cabins also affects our taste. Dr. Rinchen, director of the Travel Medicine Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, theorizes that dry nose passages can potentially alter how taste is perceived. This is because our sense of smell plays an important role in our food experience. “If your nasal mucosa is really dry, you may not be able to feel the same as normal sea level environment,” she says.
Do you feel 30,000 feet of tips? This is the reason
Low oxygen levels in the plane that can reduce the amount of oxygen reaching organs, a condition known as hypoxia, can change how alcohol affects the body. Dr. Chen compares it to being in a high-altitude city like Denver, more than 5,000 feet above sea level. “On a plane, there will be similar oxygen saturation or even lower oxygen,” she says, “low oxygenation makes you more susceptible to alcohol.”
Hines uses neurology to explain why. “I’m not technically intoxicated because my blood alcohol content is exactly the same,” he says. “But your brain processes alcohol under mild hypoxia and dehydration, so you feel more intoxicated.”
In other words, the brain is more sensitive to alcohol when it quickly loses oxygen and water. result? You may feel that the same amount of adjustments are a little less tuned than after drinking the same drink at Terra Firma.
