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—————Short Version—————In the situation of fast rotations, dizziness is caused by the mismatch of information originating in the visual and vestibular systems regarding self-position and self-rotation. Everyday experience of dizziness due to fast rotations causes the brain to undergo (neurological) habituation . Thus experienced skaters do feel dizzy but don’t faint or vomit and generally continue the routine or the excercises . Both the initial extent of dizziness and the dynamics of habituation largely vary among individuals.—————Full Version—————I guess the question is mostly about spins. Maybe, also about double, triple and quadruple jumps. Since all answers I’ve read so far are written by figure skaters and ice dancers, I’d like to present the neurobiology point of view, and in the end I made some personal notes.I’d like to start with an opposite question:why at all would we feel dizzy when rotating?Several concepts from neurobiology require a brief introduction. I’m afraid I can’t cover everything, but at least these ones seem the most relevant. I’m not elaborating on any of them since otherwise it will become too long.Vestibular-Ocular ReflexNormally, when a person makes any head movement, the eye muscles move the eyes in the opposite direction such that the field of view remains the same. This compensation is non-voluntary, it is controlled mainly by cerebellum and is called Vestibular-Ocular Reflex (VOR).VOR GainThe ratio between the angle of head (or whole body) movement and the eyes movement is called gain. Normally, the gain is 1 or at least very close to 1.What happens in rotations? I am actually familiar with experiments when the head(or whole body) movements are making sinusoidal movements (left-right-left) rather than clock- or counter-clockwise ones. However, the gain gets lower than 1 at high speeds.Opto-Kinetic NystagmusOptokinetic nystagmus, or OKN for short, is the eye movement elicited by the tracking of a moving field. Our eyes move to keep track of the field. When we rotate fast, this is what our eyes do , in addition to VOR.Brain as a prediction generatorThe main function of the brain is to generate the best prediction of the sensation. I won’t elaborate on this here, it is a long explanation. I’ve written a long answer about the function of brain here:Vitaly Lerner's answer to What are the benefits to having a more complex brain?For those unfamiliar with the basics of neuroscience: this part is more an opinion, but there is a large consensus that generation of predictions is basically what brain does.Sensory IntegrationIn order to be able to predict the outcome of self-actions of sensation, we must know (predict): our location, body angles rel. to ground, head rotation angles. We have several sources of the relevant information for such estimation, mainly eyes, vestibular organs and efferent copies of the motor neurons: the latter report what motor commands are given now to the muscles. This is a lot of information. When healthy humans move slowly , the information from all these sources is integrated and the “internal model” of self-location,self-rotation and head-rotation is generated. However, in case of the motion sickness, there is a slight disagreement between vision and vestibular information.In healthy humans, fast rotation causes eyes muscles to perform too many unvoluntary movements: VOR, OKN, in addition to “voluntary” saccades (fast movement, voluntary controlled), making the visual “picture” not very clear, by means of the certainty of self-location etc. Also the reports coming from vestibular organs are not extremely reliable, since they were not evolutionary designed to report anything under fast-rotating conditions. So , information originating in both vestibular and visual systems are not reliable and moreover, they disagree.Disagreement between sensory information coming from two sources causes dizziness. This is the way of the brain to report that something is wrong. I don’t know why dizziness is the neurological response to such disagreement, I would speculate that dizziness is the defensive response of the organism since it would cause us to lay down, and this would lead to better blood circulation and lungs function. Maybe, this is a general defence mechanism not intended for extreme unnatural situation such as fast rotations.Now, back to the original question. How come the skaters do not vomit after combinations of spins: after all we’re talking about 20–30 seconds of fast rotations.Everything I described above still holds for skaters. Figure Skaters and Ice Dancers are humans rather than aliens or rodents (rodents seem to lack dizziness, or at least their digestive system does not allow for vomiting, which makes them very bad animal models to study diziness).As many of professional figure skaters and ice dancers answered, they do feel dizzy. But there is something different about them.HabituationThe concept of habituation is used in both neuroscience and psychology. I focus on the neurobiological use of the term and totally neglect the psychology here. Dizziness is not caused by childhood trauma or thoughts about mother, after all, it is a pure neurological response.Eric R Kandel, the author of the neuroscience “bible”, “Principles of Neural Science”, Noble Prize [Physiology and Medicine] laureate, pioneered the study of neural basis of habituation and sensitization. Here is one of his classical papers :http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/data/nobelprize/194-4270-1178.pdfBasically, habituation is the reduction of the response to repetitive stimulus.In the scope of figure skating, everyday practice of spins generates repetitive feeling of dizziness. It’s unavoidable. However, after N repetitions (N varies among skaters) the brain undergoes habituation. It’s not that the dizziness disappears. It’s rather the dizziness due to rotation is no more interpreted as an “immediate danger” signal and does not disturb other brain functions too much.Importantly, so far as I know, a part of pilots’ training is rotors in both horizontal and vertical plane. Luckily, figure skaters don’t do gymnastic salto (maybe, ISU will add it to elements at some point:) )Survival BiasThe question is definitely about professional or at least experienced skaters. This issue is that the observation “Spin, but no faint/vomit” is made on those who already are habituated. In statistics this is called survival bias.Variability and a personal noteThe biological variability is a evolutionary necessity. Hence, the natural extent of dizziness and the process of habituation largely varies among beginners. I happen to be an assistant coach in beginners group ages 8–15, approximately 10 kids. 2 kids seem to feel no dizziness at all to begin with. 2 kids have a lot of trouble learning two-feet spin. Even a single trial of 2–3 full rotations on two feet make them so dizzy they must take a break of 1–2 mintes. The rest start with light dizziness in the beginning, and after couple of weeks or months do not complain about it. We do use vestibular-training exercisers off the ice. However, even a sequence of 10 half-rotation two-feet jumps makes them so dizzy we send them to walk for couple of minutes. The only way to make it work is to ensure they do it at home every single day. Unfortunately, it does not really happen.I have a motion sickness, so it was very hard for me to start doing spins. I could not get through three rotations on one foot without falling 3 seconds afterwards because of vertigo. Good news: once we went for two-weeks skating camp, and I started trying it every day . After 6 days of terrible trials, it just disappeared. I mean, at day 7 I could rotate and felt dizzy but I didn’t fall anymore.Good news: habituation works for most people, even for those suffering from motion sickness. Bad news: every new position is a new torture. The habituation seems to work separately for each position. Learning sit spin requires suffering again. The same about camel spin. Another bad news: the trick of sight focusing works for some people but it is not a general rule.

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