ESA’s Neurospat experiment: Space Brain Networking

ESA’s Neurospat experiment - An advanced MRI scan of a human brain showing neural networks.

Humans are adaptable beings. Wear glasses continuously that turn your view of the world upside-down and inside two weeks your brain will have adapted, everything will seem normal again.

Researchers suspect that astronauts’ brains adapt to living in weightlessness by using previously untapped links between neurons.

As the ESA astronauts learn to float around in their spacecraft, left–right and up–down become second nature as these connections are activated.

To confirm this theory, up to 16 ISS astronauts will be put through advanced MRI scanners before and after their flights to study any changes in their brain structure.

A control group from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, will undergo the same scans for further comparison.

In parallel, a study is being performed on volunteers aboard aircraft flights that offer 20 seconds of weightlessness at a time.

ESA astronaut André Kuipers is conducted many experiments during his PromISSe mission.

Here, André is recording his brain waves through 62 electrodes as part of ESA’s Neurospat experiment.

The goal is to understand if the brain processes tasks differently in space.