What happens to the brain when you take gravity away? According to a new study looking at astronauts both before and after space travel, that experience causes physical changes that researchers believe requires at least three years between longer missions to recover from.
The study looked at the brains of 30 astronauts and found that cavities within the brain had expanded during their time away from Earth.
What happens when you spend time in space is that the lack of gravity allows the brain to essentially float up to the top of the skull, a physical shift seen in displacements of cerebrospinal fluid, which surrounds the brain. Previous research has tracked how astronauts returning home to Earth have then experienced decreases in the fluid at the top of the brain and increases in the volume at the base of the brain — fluid draining back down as gravity reasserts itself.
They found that the answer was yes — but that this effect didn’t start right away, or continue in perpetuity. Instead, there was a window of time in which the most changes took place. Researchers looked at both ventricle expansion and gray matter volume over time, and found that short space travel trips of two weeks or under either resulted in smaller ventricle increases, or even decreases, compared to longer trips.
Researchers looked at the duration of time that astronauts had between spaceflights in order to see if this impacted their brain changes on their next trip.
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