That Neuroscience Guy - Travelling to Mars

Episode Date: October 3, 2021

There is a myriad of technical hurdles we'll have to jump through to get humans on Mars, but what about psychological hurdles? As it turns out, long-duration space travel can wreak havoc on your brain. In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the psychological problems astronauts will face when travelling to Mars, and how we're trying to solve them. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. When we finally journey to Mars, it's obviously going to be really difficult. The distance alone, a Mars mission is projected to take three years. A year to get there, a year on the surface, and a year to get home. There's all the issues with working and living in a low-gravity environment, loss of muscle tone, and other physiological changes. But what about the psychological factors?

How would a journey to Mars impact the brain of the astronauts? On today's podcast, we're going to talk about the neuroscience of going to Mars. Long-duration space travel has a massive impact on the brain. For example, depression, living away from significant others, your family and friends, that can cause some negative changes in how you feel. Even the environment itself could cause depression. And then of course, there is the isolation. If you're away for three years in a small space, that's going to have a massive impact on us. We've experienced that through COVID. One that I'll focus on here, because today I'm going to talk about my own research program and some of the stuff I do, because I play a role in this story. I'm going

to focus on cognitive fatigue. That's the state when your brain gets tired and you begin to make mistakes. And we've all experienced it. Those moments when we're overtired and all of a sudden we make choices that aren't optimal or we slip up a little bit. Well, that's cognitive fatigue. And cognitive fatigue has been shown to be almost as dangerous as being impaired with alcohol. My role in this? Well, in December of 2019, I led a Canadian research team on a one-week mission in the high seas Mars habitat on the big island of Hawaii. But I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. That's not where it all started. Back in 2012, I was a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax on the east coast of Canada. And when I was there, I first heard about the Muse. It's a mobile EEG

headband made by a company called Interaxon based out of Toronto, Canada. And the company approached me and said, well, hey, could you test our headset? We'd like to, you know, know what you think about it. And when I first got the Muse, I was a bit skeptical. The EEG systems in my lab typically cost upwards of $100,000. There are 64 electrodes on your head and it requires a considerable bit of expertise to use them. And the Muse was this little plastic headband that had a couple of sensors on the front and a couple behind the ears and at price point was about $250. And I have to admit, I was pretty skeptical when we first tested it. So what did we do? Well, we put it head-to-head with our big system, the medical grade research system.

We basically tested 60 college undergraduates with the Muse, and then we tested them again with the big system. And we were quite surprised to find that we got similar brain responses from both systems. Now, the data quality of the Muse wasn't quite the same as our $100,000 research grade system, but it was still really impressive and it was able to measure brain responses accurately. We published that paper in 2017 in Frontiers in Neuroscience. And the cool thing about it, because it's an open source journal, if you Google Craig Olson and choosing Muse, you can read it yourself. Once we figured out that the Muse was able of measuring EEG reliably,

we started wondering what to do about it. And the problem we focused on was cognitive fatigue. There's a lot of scientific literature that shows that EEG is sensitive to cognitive fatigue. When people are in that brain state where they're making poor decisions, you're able to see differences in the brain activity. And we thought, well, can we measure cognitive fatigue with a muse? So that's what we set out to do. First, we measured cognitive fatigue just in the lab. First, we measured cognitive fatigue just in the lab. One of the brain responses we were interested in was called the P300.

It's an evoked brain response that you get when you see visual things appear on a screen. And there's a large body of research that shows that this brain response, the P300, is reduced when people are experiencing cognitive fatigue. And that's what we did. We measured the P300 brain response in a whole bunch of undergraduates, and we separated them between undergraduates that were rated as having high levels of cognitive fatigue and undergraduates that were rated

as having low levels of cognitive fatigue. And lo and behold, the research that was out there was right. The brain response, the P300, is reduced when people are experiencing cognitive fatigue. If you want a deep dive on this, it's tied to norepinephrine. Norepinephrine is a neurotransmitter that's released by the locus coeruleus, a part of the midbrain structure. It's basically released to improve and facilitate decision-making and working memory.

And as it turns out, the P300 is influenced by the amount of norepinephrine that's released. So it's reduced for that reason. Anyway, we'd proven this works in undergraduate students. So we thought, well, let's try this in the real world. So we went to a mine. And by a mine, I mean an actual gold mine in Northern British Columbia. At these mines, people work 12 hours on, 12 hours off. And fatigue, and especially cognitive fatigue, is a real problem. Given the nature of this type of mining, deaths and accidents are a part of everyday life. So we approached the mine and said,

Hey, we believe we can measure fatigue at your mine site using this new mobile EEG or mobile brainwave technology, the Muse. So that's what we did. We tested miners across the seven-day shift. We tested them pre-shift and we tested them post-shift. And lo and behold, what did we find? Miners got tired working 12-hour shifts. One of the more interesting findings that we found was that miners were most tired on the seventh day of a seven-day shift. Well, not surprising to just work seven days in a row. Interestingly, we found the second day that they were most tired was the first day. And the reason for that is they'd been out on the weekend before they had to go back to work. The miners live at the mine and the dorm rooms, while very nice and the food is great, aren't exactly the

Hilton. So the miners were going out and having a great time and then coming back to work in a state of cognitive fatigue. We decided to follow this up and we measured cognitive fatigue in a hospital. We first did it in a simulation room with students, and then we did it in the actual ER of the local hospital. And lo and behold, we found that doctors and nurses were tired at the end of long shifts in the ER. One of the more interesting findings of that study was that we were able to detect some doctors and nurses who were already experiencing cognitive fatigue at the start of their shifts. I'm not going to say a lot about that finding, but you can imagine to yourself the next time you're in the hospital having a procedure done, do you really want the doctor that's tired when

they begin working? Personally, I don't. We even follow this up in everyday life. We actually set up a testing station at a local mall. We were testing in the cafeteria on campus and just about anywhere we could get people to take part. We tested a thousand people in an EEG study. It's pretty crazy when you think about it. And again, we saw this relationship between the brainwaves that we were measuring and cognitive fatigue. You might be wondering, how does Mars factor into all of this? This sounds more of a story of mobile EEG. The two things are closely tied together. I found out that NASA was extremely interested in this issue, cognitive fatigue. So we decided to test it and show that in an astronaut environment,

we could measure cognitive fatigue. And that's where the Mars Habitat came in. Working with some really good friends of mine, we arranged a one-week mission in the high seas Mars Habitat on the big island of Hawaii. You've probably seen it in the picture it's that white dome like thing on the side of a volcano and basically the hab as it is called is used to study psychological factors associated with space travel crews lock themselves in for a week a month even up to a year in one instance to study how being in that closed environment impacts the brain and other psychological factors. And it's a real simulation. Every time you go outside, you've got to put on a spacesuit. You only get 60 seconds of water to shower each day. You live off of freeze-dried food.

And your work schedule is that of an astronaut. You're expected to do the day-to-day tasks, just like the astronauts do, to simulate being on Mars, and in some cases, the moon. They use the HAB for both things. So I was lucky enough to lead a six-person research team into the HAB for a week. When I was growing up, I told my mom I wanted to be an astronaut, and that never really panned out. But at least I got that one week. And we were there to demonstrate that we could use mobile EEG, the Muse, to measure cognitive fatigue so that when astronauts go into outer space, they'll have this measure. Now, why is it important? Well, you could imagine that on the surface of Mars, if someone is cognitively fatigued and they go out to do

something, if they make a mistake, they're dead. And in some instances, they might take out the whole crew. So having this ability to monitor cognitive fatigue, not through self-report, you know, hey, are you too tired to do this? No, I feel great. We're not going to rely on that in the future. We're going to rely on these brain assessments. So we're able to measure the brainwaves of someone and say, look, you're cognitively fatigued. You actually rest today, and this other person is going to go out and do that dangerous job. And in the habit, what we did is we measured our brainwaves every day, at morning, and at lunch, and at dinner, with the whole purpose being to see if we could track cognitive fatigue. And the results were really cool.

In each of us, we saw that our brainwaves were reduced. In other words, we were more fatigued as the day progressed. Our morning scores were always the best, our lunch scores were down, and our scores at the end of the day were as low as they could get. And that made sense. 16-hour workdays, you're going to be tired at the end. What was also cool is we saw a small trend across the week. We worked seven days straight.

Even astronauts wouldn't be expected to do that. And by the end of the week, the average trend in our brain activity was down as well. We were detecting cognitive fatigue. What's really cool about this assessment is if you take a few minutes and take a look for the Muse EEG system, you'll see how small and portable it is. And we don't run it off big fancy computers. We run it off of an iPhone. So the way it works, just to give you a bit more, is you put on the Muse, you open up the iPhone,

you open up an app we've developed, and you can do a fatigue assessment in five minutes or less. And all of the analysis is done on the device. It tells you, hey, you're fatigued. Or, hey, you're good to go today. Now, we're still working on this and perfecting it. It works reasonably well, but I want to work 100%, or at least 99.9%. But that's where at least one aspect of neuroscience fits into Mars. This ability to monitor astronaut brain function so that when they're on these long duration missions, we don't have to rely on asking them how they're feeling. We can at least get some measure of what's going on in their brain. And as I said at the outset, it's not just cognitive fatigue. It's also

depression, it's anxiety, it's stress, all of these things we can monitor. So when astronauts finally make it to the red planet, we can monitor their brain health and performance and know that they'll be okay. And if they're not okay, we can intervene and try to do something to bring them back so they can keep doing the mission. Now, we're doing a lot of other cool research with this technology in my lab. I could tell you about projects where we're predicting baseball batting performance, or we're looking at whether or not we can detect Alzheimer's and dementia. But I'm going to save that for future episodes. Just remember, you can email questions to thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com.

Just remember, you can email questions to thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com. Please follow me on Twitter. You can see recent releases about research from my lab. It's That Neurosci Guy. We also have a YouTube channel now. I'm posting some videos I'm using for educational purposes at That Neuroscience Guy. And if you liked the podcast today, I gave a TEDx talk on this just last year. If you look on YouTube for Kregolson and TEDx, you'll find my talk and you can see me in action talking about mobile EEG and how I think it's going to change the world.

My name is Olof Kregolson, and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thanks for listening, and see you next week on the podcast.