# Why does spinning make you dizzy?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-spinning-make-you-dizzy/517171>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 11, 2009, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-spinning-make-you-dizzy/517171 "2009-11-11T12:16:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Snnipe\_70E](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5a626/32.png) [@Snnipe\_70E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snnipe_70E)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2009, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-spinning-make-you-dizzy/517171/21 "2009-11-16T04:27:18Z")

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> [@Superhal](#):
>
> My wife has severe motion sickness, which I think is mostly psychological, maybe connected to an overall fear of flying.
> 
> Just before a flight, she will get nauseous in any sort of travel, such as riding the car on the way to the airport.
> 
> However, after taking Dramamine, she has trained herself to ignore motion sickness, and this has also affected her psychologically.
> 
> Therefore, in my experience,\*\* if \*\*your motion sickness is mostly psychological, then yes, you can train yourself to be less susceptible to it.

Thank you for putting that IF

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**Author:** ![Oukile](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/13edae/32.png) [@Oukile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oukile)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2009, 10:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-spinning-make-you-dizzy/517171/22 "2009-11-16T10:05:59Z")

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> [@Sunspace](#):
>
> Is it possible to train yourself to be less susceptible to motion sickness? Do astronauts acclimitize to free fall? (Are those two even the same?)

Astronauts train by exposing themselves to repetitive provocative stimuli. The classical one is the tilt-while-rotating, which consists in sitting on a rotating chair and perform a series of tilts of the head (e.g. the chair rotates at 60-120°/s, or one turn in 3-6s, wait 20 s then tilt the head forward-backward, with a good amplitude and one movement every 2 to 4s. Btw, be carefull if you try it at home: you may pretty well fall from the chair). This stimulus will create aberrant canal stimulations which are in conflict with gravity signals.

Basically, this training will habituate the brain to ignore canals information Specifically, the brain usually processes vestibular information in two ways: one is to react to the ‘raw’ motion information, the other is to make some additional processing which optimizes the perception of motion. After training, this additional processing will be reduced. In other words, the reflex responses to vestibular sensory signals are maintained (which is good enough for most purposes such as gaze stabilizationand balance), but the ability of the brain to ‘make sense’ out of these signals is reduced. Which is good, because one of the classical causes of motion sickness is aberrant vestibular inputs (which don’t make sense), and schematically, after training the doesn’t care about it.

In practice, the suceptibility to motion sickness can be reduced this way. However, it can never be totally suppressed.

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