If you’ve ever found yourself tearing up during an in-flight movie, noticed that your favorite snacks taste a little off at 35,000 feet, or felt like a single cocktail hit you harder in the air than on the ground, altitude could be to blame.
Airplane cabins are pressurized to mimic conditions at about 6,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level. That means your body is exposed to environmental changes such as low cabin pressure, reduced oxygen levels, and air drier than most deserts. These conditions can alter the way you experience food, emotion, and even alcohol, explains Dustin Hines, associate professor of neuroscience in the psychology department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Are you more likely to cry at cruising altitude?
Plenty of travelers have reported becoming unusually emotional while watching films on a plane, but this phenomenon is anecdotal. No definitive scientific studies prove a direct link between flying and a heightened tendency to cry.
Still, Hines believes that certain physiological changes during air travel could help explain it. He says low oxygen levels and sleep deprivation (especially on long-haul flights that disrupt the body’s circadian rhythm) can impair the brain’s ability to regulate emotions. That’s because the amygdala, a part of the brain that processes feelings, and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for reasoning and self-control, may fall out of sync under these conditions.
“If you look at the human emotional brain and you change anything, especially sleep or oxygen, you’re going to get what’s called a prefrontal disconnect—a disconnect between an emotional area of your brain, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex that’s trying to make sense of everything,” Hines explains.
In theory, this could result in a loss of emotional control—known in psychology as “emotional disinhibition”—and cause someone to cry when they normally wouldn’t.
Does food really taste different when you’re flying?
There’s stronger scientific support for air travel’s interference with our sense of taste. A 2010 study by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, commissioned by the German airline Lufthansa, found that taste perception is diminished at altitude—making salty flavors up to 30 percent less intense and sweet ones up to 20 percent less intense.
The reason isn’t your taste buds but your brain, explains Hines. Other studies, he says, have shown a connection between sound and taste, both processed in the insula, a region of the brain involved in integrating sensory information and shaping how we perceive flavors. When you’re on a plane, the constant background noise—often hovering at about 85 decibels, which is roughly equivalent to the noise made by a lawn mower or vacuum—may alter the insula’s ability to detect flavors because it’s trying to juggle too much sensory input at once. This phenomenon has been dubbed “sonic seasoning.” It’s not all negative; studies have shown that umami flavors may be enhanced during flight.
“What they’re suggesting is that cognitive load from loud noises then changes all these other stimuli,” Hines says.
Low humidity—between 10 and 20 percent in most airplane cabins—may also affect our taste. Dr. Lin Chen, the director of the Travel Medicine Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, theorizes that drier nasal passages could potentially alter how we perceive flavors. That’s because our sense of smell plays an important role in our experience of food. “If your nasal mucosa is really dry, you may not sense the same as you would in a regular sea-level environment,” she says.
Feeling tipsy at 30,000 feet? Here’s why
Low oxygen levels in a plane—which can reduce the amount of oxygen that reaches your organs, a condition known as hypoxia—can also change how alcohol affects the body. Dr. Chen compares it to being in a high-altitude city, such as Denver, which sits more than 5,000 feet above sea level, where people often feel lightheaded after minimal exertion. “In airplanes, it would be either similar or even lower oxygen saturation,” she notes, adding that, “the lower oxygenation makes you more susceptible to the impact of alcohol.”
Hines uses neurology to explain why: “You’re technically not more intoxicated because your blood alcohol content is the exact same,” he says. “But you feel more drunk because your brain processes the alcohol under mild hypoxia and dehydration.”
In other words, the brain—already receiving less oxygen and water—becomes more sensitive to the effects of alcohol. The result? You may feel a bit more uncoordinated than you would after the same drink on terra firma.
