Mars missions could leave astronauts with severe psychological damage — new study
Simulating microgravity
The new NASA-supported study investigated the effects of microgravity on cognitive performance. But rather than sending their 24 study participants to space, they sent them to bed. That’s because the impact of a certain type of bed rest is analogous to the effects of microgravity – we use it a lot in research. When we are upright, our body and vestibular otoliths are in the same direction as gravity, while when we are lying down they are orthogonal (at right angles).
The participants in the study, therefore, had to lay on their backs at an inclination of 6° angle, with the head lower than the body, for nearly two months without changing position. They were asked to regularly perform a series of cognitive tasks designed for astronauts and relevant to spaceflight in order to evaluate their spatial orientation, memory, risk-taking behavior, and emotional understanding of others.
Results showed a small but reliable slowing of cognitive speed in tasks involving sensory and motor skills. This seems to be coherent withreported changesin brain tissue density over the “sensorimotor cortices,” the primary sensory and motor areas of the brain which help process sensory inputs and movements, observed after spaceflight. Participants also had difficulty reading emotions when looking at people’s faces.
Adjusting to changes in gravity requires time and effort. While the performance on most cognitive tasks initially declined, after about 60 days they then remained unchanged over the course of the experiment. But the ability to recognize emotions continued to worsen. In fact, participants became biased towards negative emotions – they were more likely to identify other people’s facial expressions as angry and less likely to interpret them as happy or neutral.
This is an important finding. The ability of astronauts to be sharp and quick thinkers is crucial to a space mission. So is the capability to correctly “read” each other’s emotional expressions, given they have to spend a lot of time cooped up together in a small space. Space agencies should therefore consider adequate pre-flight psychological training as well as in-flight psychological support in order to minimize this risk.
Recent advancements and investment in rocket technology are ushering in a new and exciting age of space exploration. Microgravity can be profoundly unsettling and can compromise performance levels in many ways. With an eye towards deep-space human missions to Mars, it is a pressing research goal to get a better insight into how microgravity influences cognitive performance and emotional health, as well as develop appropriate medical and psychological support for spaceflight.
This article byElisa Raffaella Ferrè, Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology,Royal Hollowayis republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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