The brains of astronauts who carry out space missions are compressed and expanded during space flight , this has been determined by research carried out by scientists at the University of Michigan (USA).
The researchers performed structural MRIs on 12 astronauts who spent two weeks as members of a shuttle crew and 14 astronauts who had spent 6 months on the International Space Station. All this between 2008 and 2012.
The results were palpable: the volume of gray matter in the astronauts increased or decreased, and the magnitude of this alteration depended on the duration of time in space ; that is, the more time they had spent in space, the more pronounced this difference in brain volume was.
“Imagine that gravity pushes all the fluids towards your feet, the problem is that this does not happen in space. This has as a consequence that there is more fluid directed to the head, which explains why we see so many photos of astronauts in which appear with a swollen face “, clarifies Rachael Seidler, leader of the work.
In addition, they also discovered that the volume of gray matter in the regions that control the movement of the legs and process the sensory information of the legs also increased, which shows changes in the brain with a view to learning movement in microgravity. These changes were greatest among the ISS astronauts. In other regions of the brain, they observed that the volume of gray matter decreased, possibly due to the redistribution of the cerebrospinal fluid that lines the central nervous system.
What is striking about the finding is that this variability was equivalent to a person practicing a new skill 24 hours a day; an extreme example of neuroplasticity of the brain.
According to the authors, this discovery could be very useful for the treatment of other health conditions that affect brain function, for example, people who remain at rest for long periods of time. And, in the same way, we could understand how much the brain can change when faced with an environment in which it has never been.
The study has been published in the journal Nature Microgravity.
