Dear Science,

Is there a scientific term (and explanation!) for that feeling of still being on the water you get when you are lying in bed after a day of swimming? Or if you've been jumping on a trampoline? Or am I crazy and the only person who gets that? A lack of Google results on the subject is not reassuring. I am stumped. Any insight would be appreciated!

Landlubber

Fear not, Landlubber! You're not crazy. Such feelings after being on a boat, lounging in the ocean or a pool, or even riding a train are common and healthy. Science even has a few choice words for you to use: dock rock, sea legs, or science's favorite, mal de débarquement.

Let's consider that day of swimming. There you are, bobbing in the pool. As always, your mind is trying to figure out where your body is in the world. At its disposal are your eyes, your ears (including the all-important inner ear, with the delicate semicircular canals and otolithic organs constantly detecting accelerations on almost all imaginable axes), the angles of your joints, and the tension of your muscles. The latter two, together deemed proprioception, are the senses of which we have the least conscious knowledge. We all spent the first few years of life wobbling around on the ground honing the interpretation of these proprioceptive senses in the deep, primitive layers of our brains. And then you jump in a pool and all the sloshing and bobbing makes no damn sense to the brain. Your limbs are moving, but your muscles are lax! Lax! What the hell?

The brain then does something remarkable. In the span of a few minutes or hours, it remaps these brain pathways—refiguring how your body and muscles work together in water—all over again. Put yourself on a bumpy plane, and the brain gets to work and comes up with a new set of mappings for the flight to Chicago. Hop on a sailboat, and in a few hours you've relearned how to walk on choppy seas.

When you return to solid land, these mappings persist for a bit and give you that funny sensation of still floating in the pool when you lie on your bed. It's one of the few rare, fleeting, and delicious ways our conscious minds become aware of the complex proprioceptive senses we constantly use to navigate the world.

How does this remapping occur? Nobody really knows yet. In fact, this whole explanation is still a bit of rough hypothesis—a wild land in biological research. Science loves these sorts of questions—the ones for which the answers do not have an immediate or obvious value. Such lines of inquiry often open doors to vast rooms of the world we hadn't even considered to exist before.

Wobbily Yours,

Science

Send your science questions to dearscience@thestranger.com.