Just a Few Months in Space May Permanently Rewire Your Brain
As humans look toward the vast unknowns of space to better understand our galactic neighborhood and stake out potential habitats, there’s one big question scientists are asking: How will the human body hold up outside Earth?
For the most part, research from NASA’s trailblazing Twins Study and other investigations show that free-floating thousands of miles above solid ground can cause big changes on immune system function, gene expression, metabolism, and even gut bacteria. Most of these physiological changes, however, reverse themselves once an astronaut is back on Earth. Others can be offset through diet, exercise, and other actions.
But when it comes to the brain, changes may be more permanent for space travelers, as found by one new peer-reviewed study published Friday in Frontiers of Neural Circuits.
In a collaborative effort between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russian space agency Roscosmos, a team of researchers found that long-duration spaceflight leads to very small but widespread changes in regions of the brain involved in sensorimotor integration—the parts of our brain that help us pick up sensory information and use it to interact with our external environment. These changes were particularly notable in a type of brain tissue called white matter, which acts as a sort of network cable connecting the brain’s computing centers (gray matter) together.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/just-a-few-months-in-space-permanently-altered-cosmonaut-brains?ref=home
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