Faulty reasoning signals

• Appeal to Authority - 28.6%
• Ambiguity (Equivocation) - 27.2%
• Anecdotal - 20%

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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

The human brain evolved with gravity as an anchor, but human spaceflight takes that anchor away.

A new study suggests that once it’s removed from gravity, the human brain undergoes a reorganization process not dissimilar from the experience of psychedelics.

The study suggests that’s why astronauts report feeling “unmoored” or “expanded” in space, as well as the phenomenon known as the “Overview Effect,” where astronauts return to Earth with a changed perspective.

Humans aren’t built to travel into space. For one, there’s the whole no-oxygen thing—pretty important for a mammal that uses that all-important gas for cellular respiration. But the list doesn’t end there. Space is also bone-crushingly cold. Radiation from the Sun (as well as galactic cosmic rays) causes severe DNA damage. There’s no easily accessible water, no food of any sort, no refueling depots. Nothing.

But a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology claims that the problem goes even deeper than just those basic material requirements. Space might also be inhospitable to our very consciousness .

“Human consciousness has evolved under the constant pull of terrestrial gravity, yet its role in shaping perception and awareness has received limited theoretical attention,” Annahita Nezami and Elisa Raffaella Ferrè, co-authors from Birkbeck University of London, wrote in the study. “As spaceflight transitions from short missions to long-duration habitation, understanding how consciousness responds to non-terrestrial gravity becomes increasingly urgent.”

At the outset, the idea makes some sense. The human brain is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, during which Earth’s steady gravity has provided a kind of structural scaffold. With that in mind, Ferrè (a professor of cognitive neuroscience) has spent years investigating what happens to the brain—and by extension, consciousness—once that scaffolding is removed.

In their study, Ferrè and Nezami rely on both anecdotal and data-driven evidence. Astronauts themselves often describe the experience of weightlessness and space travel as being “unmoored,” “expanded,” and “disconnected,” which mirrors the experiences of patients suffering from the vestibular defects caused by other psychiatric conditions. Ferrè argues that weightlessness may also be what causes the so-called “Overview Effect” —a reported shift in perception when viewing Earth from space. “You develop an instant global consciousness […] from out there on the Moon , international politics look so petty ,” as Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 astronaut, once remarked.

“ Gravity is the most persistent sensory signal in the brain and it silently contributes to lots of different things in our daily lives, like walking, jumping, lifting objects,” Ferrè told the BBC back in 2020 . “In weightlessness, the human brain has to adapt and cope with the fact that familiar 1G is no longer there. That’s why it’s not so easy to be in outer space.”

In November 2024, Ferrè herself participated in a 20-second parabolic flight funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) to further investigate the effects of microgravity on the brain. The research team collected neuroimages—both structural and functional MRI brain images—before and after the flight, as well as electrophysiological recordings captured during the 20-second weightless window. In May of this year, Ferrè conducted more parabolic flights in Spain .

In their new study, the authors say that functional imaging reveals that the brain actually reorganizes sensory and motor areas to adapt to the loss of its constant gravitational anchor, which also results in a steep drop in alpha brain waves , according to EEG recordings. These results are somewhat similar to what happens to the human brain under the influence of psychedelics.

“Neuroimaging further shows that psychedelics flatten the functional hierarchy, reducing the canonical distinction between unimodal (sensory/motor) and multimodal (associative/self-referential) cortical regions,” the authors wrote. “Analogous patterns emerge in astronauts exposed to microgravity.”

Of course, a lack of gravity is a profoundly different mechanism from and psychedelic drugs. But the two provide similar outcomes by loosening the brain’s network hierarchies while enhancing a more fluid perception .

That gives the idea of a “trip to outer space” a whole new meaning.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.

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