November 11, 2022 • 18 mins
Astronauts undergo rigorous training to prepare their bodies and minds for space, but once they arrive, the experience of being weightless thousands of miles above Earth is like nothing they’ve ever felt before. Join host Anahad O’Connor as he learns from former NASA astronaut and International Space Station commander Leroy Chiao about what it’s like to work and sleep in space, including the dramatic changes the body endures over the course of a mission. Sleep science researcher Dr. Mathias Basner joins to share how zero gravity and noise can impact everyday activities like resting in space.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Three two YEA. Space flight definitely changed me. I think
it has definitely has an effect on everyone who goes
up there, even for a short mission. So, you know,
just looking down at the Earth, I mean, it's just
so beautiful and colorful and looks extremely peaceful, right your.
(00:27):
Very few people have viewed Earth the way le Roy
Chow has, from over four hundred kilometers above the planet's
surface and cruising at an unimaginable seventeen thousand miles per hour.
Leroy is a chemical engineer and a former NASA astronaut
who's been to outer space on four separate missions, racking
(00:48):
up two hundred and twenty nine days in space. One
of the things that a lot of people find weird,
and I found a little weird too, is you're not
sure what to do with your your head and your neck.
You know, because you're on Earth you're used to feeling
that pressure on your head against a pillow, and in space,
of course, you're just kind of I mean, we actually
do have like a little phone block at the top
(01:08):
of the sleeping bag that you can act as a pillow,
and there's a cloth of fabrics trap with velcrow that
you can strap against your forehead if you need that
pressure against the back of your head to fall asleep,
and I don't think anyone really uses that. Spending that
much time in orbit means that Leroy and his fellow
astronauts will definitely see the effects of that environment on
their bodies, particularly when they're trying to sleep, which is
(01:31):
even more of a challenge in space than it is
on Earth. The lack of gravity effects astronauts spines, their brains,
and even the amount of fluid build up in their
nasal cavities, just to name a few of the challenges.
All of these things just make it even more difficult
to get good rest on the final frontier. Sleep is
not only important when you're really young, but it's important
(01:54):
as a lifestyle, even as a professional, to make sure
you get enough sleep so that your brain can develop
to it's full capacity. And certainly, anyone in any position
where you have to perform, you know that you've performed
best obviously when you've had good sleep and good rest.
So sleep is definitely an important thing and it and
it is a challenge in space. Beyond the expected challenges
(02:16):
of sleeping in space, Leroy experienced a sort of jet
lag as he first embarked, So we kept the laboratory
running twenty four hours a day, and so that meant
that four hours after launching into space for my first time,
I had to go to sleep. And so imagine being
so excited to be in space for the first time,
looking at the air and floating. You know, we're in
(02:37):
this weird environment. Feeling a little weird because you know
you're floating and you're in space, and they're all these
physiological changes happening in your body. Anyway, the biology and
functions of the human body have been shaped in part
by its evolution in the gravity of Earth. So how
does an astronaut's body, having escaped that gravity, adapt to
(02:59):
life in a spacecraft speeding through the vacuum of space.
Today we're going to explore what it's like getting rest
for our bodies in the ultra hostile environment of outer space,
and how the absence of gravity and abundance of radiation
affect the delicate mechanisms that allow our bodies and our
brains to power down and recharge. On this episode of
(03:22):
Chasing Sleep, Sleep, the final Frontier. Hi, I'm on a
hut O'Connor, and this is Chasing Sleep and I heart
radio production and partnership with Mattress Firm. Sleep in space
(03:48):
is pretty weird, you know, especially the first time to
get up there. Once we launched into space, I have
to say we were kind of pretty worn out by
the time we did fly. And that's kind of a
joke among ast or not especially those of us who
fly on the Space station, which is not really a joke.
It's like, you know, you're ready to go fly when
you're completely exhausted, and so, you know, not necessarily the
(04:10):
best way to launch into space. Right, So you're high
above the Earth's atmosphere in space, a million things going
through your mind and all sorts of different environmental effects
happening to your body. What exactly is it like to
sleep up there? We had sleep stations on that flights
because we were to shift operations, which meant we had
(04:32):
kind of little, you know, little closets if you will. Um.
I hate to I hate to use this word, but
they're kind of like little coffins that we could get
into and slide the door shut so it would be dark,
and put ear plugs in. Leroy continued to tell the
story of his first time sleeping in space, getting to
the obstacle that I find most interesting zero gravity. And
(04:53):
so I got into my little bunk after I had
taken my sleeping pills, and it was dark, and had
my ear plugs in, and I knew the orientation of
the Space shuttle. Usually it was always the belly of
the shuttle facing the Earth, so I knew the orientation
of the shuttle. I knew my orientation inside of that
dark sleep station. And I was laying on my back.
Although I was floating, I wasn't really laying. I was
(05:14):
just floating in there in a sleeping bag, and I
kind of felt like laying on my side, and it
didn't make any sense whatsoever. But I rotated ninety degrees
and in my mind I knew I was on my
side relative to the Earth. Didn't make any difference because
I was, you know, floating, and then I fell asleep.
So just describing these sleep closets seems like an interesting
place to have to squeeze into for rest, are there
(05:37):
multiple astronauts in each bunk? And exactly how tight is
the space on a bed up there in space? It
looks like a big box. Okay, So you slide the
door open and you kind of get yourself inside, and
then there's three other people beneath you if you're on
the top right, but you're all separate. You're on your
own little box. And there's air flow, so you got
plenty of ventilation, so you don't, you know, build up
(05:59):
carbon dox and all that, and but the sleeping bags
in there, and it's just kind of floating in there.
There's not much room. There's room for nothing else except you, basically.
So one part about being an astronaut you can't be
the slightest pit claustrophobic, and that doesn't work out. But
it's not that bad. It's not uncomfortable. Maybe it's not uncomfortable,
but there's a reason it takes months of training just
(06:21):
to get used to sleeping in those quarters. And beyond
the training, Leroy explained how extensively he and his fellow
astronauts were monitored for sleep and for other medical conditions. So,
for example, on that same first mission, I had to
wear an actograph during uh my sleep period was a
little thing I had to put on my wrist and
it was just monitor. It was trying to get a
(06:41):
handle on how well I was sleeping, how restless I was,
how long it took for me to stop moving around
and go to sleep, and then during sleep how much
I moved around? So they were collecting data like that.
There are also journals that you keep that you could
keep on your you know, part of that was your
sleep quality. How was your sleep quality? Uh? Anecdotally for myself,
(07:02):
it seems like I need a little less sleep in space.
I don't know why. It just seems like maybe I
need about an hour or less in space, or I
would wake up maybe an hour earlier than I might
here on the Earth and sleep was okay. The struggle
to get good sleep and outer space may not be easy,
but Leroy told me about plenty of moments that made
all the hard work well worth it. Yeah. I think
(07:23):
the most uh wow moment of my space flights was
on my third flight. We were on the second major
assembly mission of Space Station program. And during that time
I was doing a spacewalk, one of the spacewalks, and
then my my boots were attached to the robotic arm
of the Space Shuttle and I was being moved from
one work side to another. And during that transition of
(07:43):
several minutes, during a good part of it, I was
faced down towards the Earth, and I couldn't see the
space station or the space shuttle out of my peripheral vision,
and so I was looking straight down at the Earth,
watching the clouds and the continents roll by, and I
felt like a satellite flying over the Earth. So that
was probably the most amazing, you know, a few minutes
of my career. We'll be right back after a brief
(08:08):
message from our partners at Mattress Firm, and now back
to chasing sleep. The moment the human body enters space
a place we've definitely not evolved to be, our bodies
inter mechanisms start to change. We evolved here on Earth,
(08:31):
so life generally likes where it evolved, and so humans.
There are a number of biomedical things that happened to
us in space, and none of them are good. A
lot of people have a little bit of congestion because
in space is a fluid shift where you're no longer
have gravity pulling fluids down into your legs, so you
have a fluid shift, and even though your body tries
(08:51):
to calibrate that, in fact, the average person loses about
two leads of water in space. You know, you you
carry about two leaders less water in space when you're
floating around. So imagine one of those big soda bottles.
That's how much less water is in the average person.
And but nonetheless you still feel a little bit full headed,
a little bit like you're laying on an inclined head down,
(09:12):
and so that can make you feel a little bit congested.
And so you know, that was something I was aware of, uh,
during my sleep, is that I couldn't breathe. This is
easily through my nose, you know, and sometimes that would
wake me up or something. Leroy has amazing firsthand insight
into the challenges that astronaut's face and the techniques to
(09:32):
overcome them. So to better understand the technicalities behind how
space is affecting our bodies and brains, I sat down
with Dr Matthias Bosner, a professor of psychiatry. I joined
the German Aerospace Center actually the Flight Physiology division, and
was actually hired to investigate the effects of aircraft noise
(09:53):
on sleep. Was the largest study ever that was done
at the time at the German Aerospace Center. Stayed at
the German aerospacent the footage years, studied a lot of sleep,
then came to the United States and did a lot
of work in space flight and an astronauts. Dr Matthias
Parsner broke down exactly what's going on in and around
(10:13):
the bodies of astronauts that makes it so hard for
them to sleep. We also see some volume shifts in
the brain and the volumes that carry the cerebral spinal
fluid they actually extend during long duration space flight. And
then there's a radiation which is not a super big
deal on the I S because it's still in it's
(10:33):
a low Earth orbit and it's within Earth magnetic shield.
But once we venture out of a low Earth orbit,
you know, back to the Moon or two Mars, radiation
becomes a major issue. And we actually generated predictive models
for a mass so looking at all the different environmental
stressors on the I S, and radiation was one that
(10:54):
was consistently showing up and that it was affecting cognit
performance even the oh they're still you know, in that
protective environment magnetically. But then there's also the nutrition is different.
On the is s. You have oftentimes elevated carbon dioxide
levels that can affect performance sometimes you know, lower oxygen levels.
(11:17):
You have just the psychological stress related to living in
an isolated, confined, an extreme environment with the threat to
life component. These changes on your body can be very
jarring for first time astronauts, but with enough time, incredibly
the human body begins to adapt, including changes to how
(11:40):
our brain functions. There is a lot of adaptation going on,
both physiologically but also from a brain perspective, because you
know that gravity vector is gone, and you know your
your brain kind of has to rewire itself or or
reweight the different neural connections to make sense of this.
(12:01):
You know, for example, the visual input becomes much more
important now because you know, our vestibulous system that tells
us how we are oriented in space is no longer working.
Basically it switched off, right, So there's a lot of
brain placidity going on. But also you know, because of that,
nausea is a big problem during the first you know,
(12:22):
one or two weeks, and you know there's a medication
for that as well. Or back pain is another is
another big issue. You know, astronauts spines are actually extending
because you know, we don't have that gravity vector, and
you know the spine is not compressed when we're walking around.
It's pretty interesting how studying something that might seem as
foreign as an astronaut sleeping in space gives us great
(12:46):
insight into how our bodies work down here on Earth.
I asked Matthias what other info he was able to
discover for us Earth links while studying the sleep of astronauts.
We did the study in twenty for astronauts, measured their
perform moments and we asked them questions about their sleep
and how they felt, etcetera. But at the time we
(13:06):
didn't have the environmental data from the International Space Station.
It was actually very interesting to see which variables were
you know, showing up. And I already mentioned the radiation
that's not that relevant on Earth, but CEO two, for example,
is one of the factors that plays a role. And
we just did another study here on on Earth in
bedroom of participants who were wearing like an active graph
(13:29):
which is a fitbit like device for fourteen consecutive nights
or twenty four our periods, and we measured you know,
air pollution PM two point five levels in the bedroom,
CEO two levels, temperature, humidity and noise and low and behold,
we get significant effects on sleep of air pollution CEO
(13:50):
two temperature, and noise always in the sense that higher
levels are worse for sleep. So in that sense, I
think a lot of the things that we observed on
the I S S translate back nicely to situations on Earth.
Matthias's job is to study all the physiological effects of
(14:10):
outer space so we can avoid any surprises on the
adventurers that are heading up there, but dealing with an
environment as new as that, there will always be something unexpected.
I found the challenge regarding noise particularly surprising. My assumption
would have been that up in space that you're probably
dealing with less noise than you are on the ground. Well,
(14:33):
you know, outside the space station it's incredibly quiet because
you have a vacuum and days there's you know, sounds
are not transported at all. But inside the space station
you have you know, lots of pumps and devices and alarms,
so there's a constant background noise level. But there's also
you know, intermittent noise events that can grab your attention
(14:56):
and also affect your sleep. Yeah, So how does that
kind of noise a factor sleep? What does it do? Well?
You know, one thing is that our auditory system has
kind of a watchman function it's it's like always online,
it's constantly monitoring our environment for potential threats. So we
(15:17):
have to have some sensory inputs that we're still monitoring
while we're sleeping, and if everything dangerous comes up, you know,
we're woken up and so that we can actually run
away and and get away from that threat. So the
auditory system is monitoring the environment while we're sleeping, and
not only for sound levels, but actually for content. There
were studies as earliest in the nineteen sixties where they
(15:38):
would play back names and whenever your own name was
played back, you would wake up with a much higher
probability than when it was just another name that didn't
have a meaning for you. So it's both sound levels
and content that do matter. So in that sense, you
know if you have an alarm, I mean alarm, alarm
is actually meant to grab your attention and to arouse you,
(16:00):
like an alarm clock, right or baby crying that those
are those sounds have properties that that make you wake up.
So if there's an alarm of the isis obviously you
know the intent is to wake you up. But oftentimes
there are like alarms that are not that important that
void you up. Nevertheless, so there is you know, a
pump running every time there's a change in the noise
(16:20):
levels that is very meaningful to humans and more likely
to wake you up. So this is, you know, when
it's a noisy on the International Space Station that may
actually affect the astronauts sleep as well. The mechanism in
our brains that can determine which noises are normal and
which are important, all while we're basically shut off has
(16:41):
got to be one of evolution's most useful and coolest achievements,
the testament to our species ability to explore even places
we were explicitly never meant to go. The thing that
surprised me is how quickly, just how adaptable the human
body is. Like you get up there, it's one of
the weirdest environments. You can suddenly find yourself in your
floating You feel weird, you're you're dizzy. For the first
(17:04):
couple of days, You've you've got this fluid shift going on,
so you feel like you're standing on your head. But
then after a few days, even the people that have
trouble a little trouble adapting, even they will adapt. And
then you know, surprisingly even after short shuttle mission of
one or two weeks. When you come back, your body
has already forgotten what it's like to be on Earth,
and so you've got to adapt to being back on
(17:25):
Earth where you're dizzy again. You can't walk a straight
line save your life. Um, you feel might feel a
little nauseous, you might feel fatigued and low on energy.
But after a few days after a shuttle mission, you
bounce back pretty well. So the human body can adapt
to these different environments. Uh. Surprisingly, Well, that's all for
(17:47):
this episode. Join me again next week when we learn
about people who live at the top of the world,
where the sun stays in the sky for months at
a time, and how the perpetual daytime affects their sleeping patterns.
Of Winter is so much easier just because it's dock
all the time. But in the summer we have to
like just close all the windows, all the cones, put
(18:08):
like cobboard on to block out the light. At like
ten pm, just run around the house play operation nighttime.
We want to hear from you. Leave a rating or
review for our show on your podcast player of choice.
You can find me on Twitter at on a hot O'Connor.
Until next time, hoping you're living your best while sleeping
(18:28):
your best. Chasing Sleep is a production of I Heart
Radio in partnership with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is
Molly Sosha. Our EP of Post is James Foster. Our
supervising producer is Kia Swinton. Our producer is Sierra Kaiser.
Our researcher and writer is Eric Lesia. This show is
(18:49):
hosted by me On a Hot O'Connor
Three two YEA. Space flight definitely changed me. I think
it has definitely has an effect on everyone who goes
up there, even for a short mission. So, you know,
just looking down at the Earth, I mean, it's just
so beautiful and colorful and looks extremely peaceful, right your.
(00:27):
Very few people have viewed Earth the way le Roy
Chow has, from over four hundred kilometers above the planet's
surface and cruising at an unimaginable seventeen thousand miles per hour.
Leroy is a chemical engineer and a former NASA astronaut
who's been to outer space on four separate missions, racking
(00:48):
up two hundred and twenty nine days in space. One
of the things that a lot of people find weird,
and I found a little weird too, is you're not
sure what to do with your your head and your neck.
You know, because you're on Earth you're used to feeling
that pressure on your head against a pillow, and in space,
of course, you're just kind of I mean, we actually
do have like a little phone block at the top
(01:08):
of the sleeping bag that you can act as a pillow,
and there's a cloth of fabrics trap with velcrow that
you can strap against your forehead if you need that
pressure against the back of your head to fall asleep,
and I don't think anyone really uses that. Spending that
much time in orbit means that Leroy and his fellow
astronauts will definitely see the effects of that environment on
their bodies, particularly when they're trying to sleep, which is
(01:31):
even more of a challenge in space than it is
on Earth. The lack of gravity effects astronauts spines, their brains,
and even the amount of fluid build up in their
nasal cavities, just to name a few of the challenges.
All of these things just make it even more difficult
to get good rest on the final frontier. Sleep is
not only important when you're really young, but it's important
(01:54):
as a lifestyle, even as a professional, to make sure
you get enough sleep so that your brain can develop
to it's full capacity. And certainly, anyone in any position
where you have to perform, you know that you've performed
best obviously when you've had good sleep and good rest.
So sleep is definitely an important thing and it and
it is a challenge in space. Beyond the expected challenges
(02:16):
of sleeping in space, Leroy experienced a sort of jet
lag as he first embarked, So we kept the laboratory
running twenty four hours a day, and so that meant
that four hours after launching into space for my first time,
I had to go to sleep. And so imagine being
so excited to be in space for the first time,
looking at the air and floating. You know, we're in
(02:37):
this weird environment. Feeling a little weird because you know
you're floating and you're in space, and they're all these
physiological changes happening in your body. Anyway, the biology and
functions of the human body have been shaped in part
by its evolution in the gravity of Earth. So how
does an astronaut's body, having escaped that gravity, adapt to
(02:59):
life in a spacecraft speeding through the vacuum of space.
Today we're going to explore what it's like getting rest
for our bodies in the ultra hostile environment of outer space,
and how the absence of gravity and abundance of radiation
affect the delicate mechanisms that allow our bodies and our
brains to power down and recharge. On this episode of
(03:22):
Chasing Sleep, Sleep, the final Frontier. Hi, I'm on a
hut O'Connor, and this is Chasing Sleep and I heart
radio production and partnership with Mattress Firm. Sleep in space
(03:48):
is pretty weird, you know, especially the first time to
get up there. Once we launched into space, I have
to say we were kind of pretty worn out by
the time we did fly. And that's kind of a
joke among ast or not especially those of us who
fly on the Space station, which is not really a joke.
It's like, you know, you're ready to go fly when
you're completely exhausted, and so, you know, not necessarily the
(04:10):
best way to launch into space. Right, So you're high
above the Earth's atmosphere in space, a million things going
through your mind and all sorts of different environmental effects
happening to your body. What exactly is it like to
sleep up there? We had sleep stations on that flights
because we were to shift operations, which meant we had
(04:32):
kind of little, you know, little closets if you will. Um.
I hate to I hate to use this word, but
they're kind of like little coffins that we could get
into and slide the door shut so it would be dark,
and put ear plugs in. Leroy continued to tell the
story of his first time sleeping in space, getting to
the obstacle that I find most interesting zero gravity. And
(04:53):
so I got into my little bunk after I had
taken my sleeping pills, and it was dark, and had
my ear plugs in, and I knew the orientation of
the Space shuttle. Usually it was always the belly of
the shuttle facing the Earth, so I knew the orientation
of the shuttle. I knew my orientation inside of that
dark sleep station. And I was laying on my back.
Although I was floating, I wasn't really laying. I was
(05:14):
just floating in there in a sleeping bag, and I
kind of felt like laying on my side, and it
didn't make any sense whatsoever. But I rotated ninety degrees
and in my mind I knew I was on my
side relative to the Earth. Didn't make any difference because
I was, you know, floating, and then I fell asleep.
So just describing these sleep closets seems like an interesting
place to have to squeeze into for rest, are there
(05:37):
multiple astronauts in each bunk? And exactly how tight is
the space on a bed up there in space? It
looks like a big box. Okay, So you slide the
door open and you kind of get yourself inside, and
then there's three other people beneath you if you're on
the top right, but you're all separate. You're on your
own little box. And there's air flow, so you got
plenty of ventilation, so you don't, you know, build up
(05:59):
carbon dox and all that, and but the sleeping bags
in there, and it's just kind of floating in there.
There's not much room. There's room for nothing else except you, basically.
So one part about being an astronaut you can't be
the slightest pit claustrophobic, and that doesn't work out. But
it's not that bad. It's not uncomfortable. Maybe it's not uncomfortable,
but there's a reason it takes months of training just
(06:21):
to get used to sleeping in those quarters. And beyond
the training, Leroy explained how extensively he and his fellow
astronauts were monitored for sleep and for other medical conditions. So,
for example, on that same first mission, I had to
wear an actograph during uh my sleep period was a
little thing I had to put on my wrist and
it was just monitor. It was trying to get a
(06:41):
handle on how well I was sleeping, how restless I was,
how long it took for me to stop moving around
and go to sleep, and then during sleep how much
I moved around? So they were collecting data like that.
There are also journals that you keep that you could
keep on your you know, part of that was your
sleep quality. How was your sleep quality? Uh? Anecdotally for myself,
(07:02):
it seems like I need a little less sleep in space.
I don't know why. It just seems like maybe I
need about an hour or less in space, or I
would wake up maybe an hour earlier than I might
here on the Earth and sleep was okay. The struggle
to get good sleep and outer space may not be easy,
but Leroy told me about plenty of moments that made
all the hard work well worth it. Yeah. I think
(07:23):
the most uh wow moment of my space flights was
on my third flight. We were on the second major
assembly mission of Space Station program. And during that time
I was doing a spacewalk, one of the spacewalks, and
then my my boots were attached to the robotic arm
of the Space Shuttle and I was being moved from
one work side to another. And during that transition of
(07:43):
several minutes, during a good part of it, I was
faced down towards the Earth, and I couldn't see the
space station or the space shuttle out of my peripheral vision,
and so I was looking straight down at the Earth,
watching the clouds and the continents roll by, and I
felt like a satellite flying over the Earth. So that
was probably the most amazing, you know, a few minutes
of my career. We'll be right back after a brief
(08:08):
message from our partners at Mattress Firm, and now back
to chasing sleep. The moment the human body enters space
a place we've definitely not evolved to be, our bodies
inter mechanisms start to change. We evolved here on Earth,
(08:31):
so life generally likes where it evolved, and so humans.
There are a number of biomedical things that happened to
us in space, and none of them are good. A
lot of people have a little bit of congestion because
in space is a fluid shift where you're no longer
have gravity pulling fluids down into your legs, so you
have a fluid shift, and even though your body tries
(08:51):
to calibrate that, in fact, the average person loses about
two leads of water in space. You know, you you
carry about two leaders less water in space when you're
floating around. So imagine one of those big soda bottles.
That's how much less water is in the average person.
And but nonetheless you still feel a little bit full headed,
a little bit like you're laying on an inclined head down,
(09:12):
and so that can make you feel a little bit congested.
And so you know, that was something I was aware of, uh,
during my sleep, is that I couldn't breathe. This is
easily through my nose, you know, and sometimes that would
wake me up or something. Leroy has amazing firsthand insight
into the challenges that astronaut's face and the techniques to
(09:32):
overcome them. So to better understand the technicalities behind how
space is affecting our bodies and brains, I sat down
with Dr Matthias Bosner, a professor of psychiatry. I joined
the German Aerospace Center actually the Flight Physiology division, and
was actually hired to investigate the effects of aircraft noise
(09:53):
on sleep. Was the largest study ever that was done
at the time at the German Aerospace Center. Stayed at
the German aerospacent the footage years, studied a lot of sleep,
then came to the United States and did a lot
of work in space flight and an astronauts. Dr Matthias
Parsner broke down exactly what's going on in and around
(10:13):
the bodies of astronauts that makes it so hard for
them to sleep. We also see some volume shifts in
the brain and the volumes that carry the cerebral spinal
fluid they actually extend during long duration space flight. And
then there's a radiation which is not a super big
deal on the I S because it's still in it's
(10:33):
a low Earth orbit and it's within Earth magnetic shield.
But once we venture out of a low Earth orbit,
you know, back to the Moon or two Mars, radiation
becomes a major issue. And we actually generated predictive models
for a mass so looking at all the different environmental
stressors on the I S, and radiation was one that
(10:54):
was consistently showing up and that it was affecting cognit
performance even the oh they're still you know, in that
protective environment magnetically. But then there's also the nutrition is different.
On the is s. You have oftentimes elevated carbon dioxide
levels that can affect performance sometimes you know, lower oxygen levels.
(11:17):
You have just the psychological stress related to living in
an isolated, confined, an extreme environment with the threat to
life component. These changes on your body can be very
jarring for first time astronauts, but with enough time, incredibly
the human body begins to adapt, including changes to how
(11:40):
our brain functions. There is a lot of adaptation going on,
both physiologically but also from a brain perspective, because you
know that gravity vector is gone, and you know your
your brain kind of has to rewire itself or or
reweight the different neural connections to make sense of this.
(12:01):
You know, for example, the visual input becomes much more
important now because you know, our vestibulous system that tells
us how we are oriented in space is no longer working.
Basically it switched off, right, So there's a lot of
brain placidity going on. But also you know, because of that,
nausea is a big problem during the first you know,
(12:22):
one or two weeks, and you know there's a medication
for that as well. Or back pain is another is
another big issue. You know, astronauts spines are actually extending
because you know, we don't have that gravity vector, and
you know the spine is not compressed when we're walking around.
It's pretty interesting how studying something that might seem as
foreign as an astronaut sleeping in space gives us great
(12:46):
insight into how our bodies work down here on Earth.
I asked Matthias what other info he was able to
discover for us Earth links while studying the sleep of astronauts.
We did the study in twenty for astronauts, measured their
perform moments and we asked them questions about their sleep
and how they felt, etcetera. But at the time we
(13:06):
didn't have the environmental data from the International Space Station.
It was actually very interesting to see which variables were
you know, showing up. And I already mentioned the radiation
that's not that relevant on Earth, but CEO two, for example,
is one of the factors that plays a role. And
we just did another study here on on Earth in
bedroom of participants who were wearing like an active graph
(13:29):
which is a fitbit like device for fourteen consecutive nights
or twenty four our periods, and we measured you know,
air pollution PM two point five levels in the bedroom,
CEO two levels, temperature, humidity and noise and low and behold,
we get significant effects on sleep of air pollution CEO
(13:50):
two temperature, and noise always in the sense that higher
levels are worse for sleep. So in that sense, I
think a lot of the things that we observed on
the I S S translate back nicely to situations on Earth.
Matthias's job is to study all the physiological effects of
(14:10):
outer space so we can avoid any surprises on the
adventurers that are heading up there, but dealing with an
environment as new as that, there will always be something unexpected.
I found the challenge regarding noise particularly surprising. My assumption
would have been that up in space that you're probably
dealing with less noise than you are on the ground. Well,
(14:33):
you know, outside the space station it's incredibly quiet because
you have a vacuum and days there's you know, sounds
are not transported at all. But inside the space station
you have you know, lots of pumps and devices and alarms,
so there's a constant background noise level. But there's also
you know, intermittent noise events that can grab your attention
(14:56):
and also affect your sleep. Yeah, So how does that
kind of noise a factor sleep? What does it do? Well?
You know, one thing is that our auditory system has
kind of a watchman function it's it's like always online,
it's constantly monitoring our environment for potential threats. So we
(15:17):
have to have some sensory inputs that we're still monitoring
while we're sleeping, and if everything dangerous comes up, you know,
we're woken up and so that we can actually run
away and and get away from that threat. So the
auditory system is monitoring the environment while we're sleeping, and
not only for sound levels, but actually for content. There
were studies as earliest in the nineteen sixties where they
(15:38):
would play back names and whenever your own name was
played back, you would wake up with a much higher
probability than when it was just another name that didn't
have a meaning for you. So it's both sound levels
and content that do matter. So in that sense, you
know if you have an alarm, I mean alarm, alarm
is actually meant to grab your attention and to arouse you,
(16:00):
like an alarm clock, right or baby crying that those
are those sounds have properties that that make you wake up.
So if there's an alarm of the isis obviously you
know the intent is to wake you up. But oftentimes
there are like alarms that are not that important that
void you up. Nevertheless, so there is you know, a
pump running every time there's a change in the noise
(16:20):
levels that is very meaningful to humans and more likely
to wake you up. So this is, you know, when
it's a noisy on the International Space Station that may
actually affect the astronauts sleep as well. The mechanism in
our brains that can determine which noises are normal and
which are important, all while we're basically shut off has
(16:41):
got to be one of evolution's most useful and coolest achievements,
the testament to our species ability to explore even places
we were explicitly never meant to go. The thing that
surprised me is how quickly, just how adaptable the human
body is. Like you get up there, it's one of
the weirdest environments. You can suddenly find yourself in your
floating You feel weird, you're you're dizzy. For the first
(17:04):
couple of days, You've you've got this fluid shift going on,
so you feel like you're standing on your head. But
then after a few days, even the people that have
trouble a little trouble adapting, even they will adapt. And
then you know, surprisingly even after short shuttle mission of
one or two weeks. When you come back, your body
has already forgotten what it's like to be on Earth,
and so you've got to adapt to being back on
(17:25):
Earth where you're dizzy again. You can't walk a straight
line save your life. Um, you feel might feel a
little nauseous, you might feel fatigued and low on energy.
But after a few days after a shuttle mission, you
bounce back pretty well. So the human body can adapt
to these different environments. Uh. Surprisingly, Well, that's all for
(17:47):
this episode. Join me again next week when we learn
about people who live at the top of the world,
where the sun stays in the sky for months at
a time, and how the perpetual daytime affects their sleeping patterns.
Of Winter is so much easier just because it's dock
all the time. But in the summer we have to
like just close all the windows, all the cones, put
(18:08):
like cobboard on to block out the light. At like
ten pm, just run around the house play operation nighttime.
We want to hear from you. Leave a rating or
review for our show on your podcast player of choice.
You can find me on Twitter at on a hot O'Connor.
Until next time, hoping you're living your best while sleeping
(18:28):
your best. Chasing Sleep is a production of I Heart
Radio in partnership with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is
Molly Sosha. Our EP of Post is James Foster. Our
supervising producer is Kia Swinton. Our producer is Sierra Kaiser.
Our researcher and writer is Eric Lesia. This show is
(18:49):
hosted by me On a Hot O'Connor
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