The Mysterious Mental Side Effects of Traveling into Space

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3036887/out-of-this-world-the-mysterious-mental-side-effects-of-traveling-into-space

by benbreen • 12 years ago

100 43 12 years ago

blhack3• 12 years ago

I wonder how different this is from the feelings you get from traveling to somewhere very different from the place where you normally live.

This is pretty corny:

Every year I go to Burning Man. It's the only "real" vacation I really take. I completely detach. No phones, no television, no news from the outside world, and except on days when I have volunteer shifts, no sense of "time".

It's pretty amazing how much you end up detaching from "default" world (which is burner parlance for the world outside of Black Rock City). By a few days in, default just feels impossibly far away, like none of it matters whatsoever, and you are completely detached from it. BRC is on another planet, and Default Planet doesn't matter.

All of the social conventions are different, all of the interactions or somehow (although indescribably, at least for me) different. Everything just feels different somehow.

Do most people get that feeling on "normal" vacations?

Loughla• 12 years ago

The following statement is not meant to be snarky.

Do you think that feeling of difference in interaction and being detached from "default" world has anything to do with the drugs? Either yourself taking them or just the masses of people around you?

I ask, because I noticed that same sense of difference and detachment myself while I lived in a lovely commune after college, but attributed it mostly to heavy drug use.

enraged_camel• 12 years ago

I don't think it's the drugs.

I used to do cross-country backpacking. The kind where you go on multi-day trips out in the wilderness, well out of the range of any technology (except GPS). What is remarkable about such trips is exactly the type of detachment that the parent describes.

It also gives a profound sense of perspective. You kind of realize how inconsequential your day-to-day concerns are. You know, stuff like trying to not be late to morning stand-ups or vertically centering the text inside some div. You realize how small you are in the grand scheme of things. The forests and rivers and mountains existed long before you were born and they will continue to exist long after you die. In their eyes -- if they had eyes -- you don't matter. You're less than a speck. You're nothing. Then when you lie down in your tent that night and the only thing you can hear are the sounds of nature around you, what happens is that you stop giving a shit about your "default" life.

Several days later, on your way back to civilization, your phone beeps and you realize you're now within range of a cellular tower. Annoyed, you punch in your passcode to silence it. Oh, what's this? Your friend texted you two days ago, inviting you to a house party on Saturday. Better respond real quick so he doesn't think you're ignoring him. And maybe check email while at it, too.

And that's how you get sucked back into bullshit.

meursault334• 12 years ago

As the other poster indicated this sense of being detached can occur in other settings where drugs are not present.

When I walked the Camino de Santiago, I felt a major difference in interaction with other people and detached from the rest of the world. At least for me the experience gave me a megadose of a kind of empathy for other people I hadn't often experienced before. This combined with the fact of taking off each day not knowing where you would stay or what your sleeping conditions would be created a powerful sense of detachment from the cares of the "real" world.

blhack3• 12 years ago

I will say the following: I don't do drugs at burning man, and most of the people around me also don't do drugs at burning man. Most of us are pretty busy working, or otherwise doing things that would be pretty badly hampered by drug use.

comrade1• 12 years ago

Yes, you're right, it's corny.

Not to offend, but this is typical of HN contributors, to equate a completely mundane Experience with something much deeper and interesting and for no one to call you out on your pap.

Someday once space tourism starts it will be the equivalent of burning man. Until then... Burning man hasn't been cool since it left ocean beach.

scott_s• 12 years ago

To answer your final question, no, I don't think so.

As a kid, I went on trail camp. We would hike for about a week, walking about 10 miles a day with a heavy pack. You get into a routine: rise, eat breakfast, take down the tent, pack up, start hiking. Stop for food. Continue hiking, make camp in late afternoon. Go down for the night, start over.

Getting into the routine was easy, and eventually "civilization" felt very, very far away. To the point that you would think about simple things like soft beds and flushing toilets as incomprehensible luxuries.

Getting back into the real world was always more of an adjustment than leaving.

pavlov2• 12 years ago

For most of the people on this planet, soft beds and flushing toilets are unattainable luxuries.

As the majority, maybe their world is actually the "real world"?

contingencies• 12 years ago

This is very different from traveling, including the special feeling of being humbled in nature for prolonged periods. I get that pretty often, especially when sailing solo.

Disassociation can take multiple forms but is the sort of thing where you might look in a mirror and see [what feels like] someone else, think freely of your normal identity (particularly with regards to social identity), or in extreme cases lose any grounding basis for sensory input entirely.

Further reading: sensory deprivation, ketamine.

pithon• 12 years ago

I used to get this feeling at music festivals (just alcohol, if you're wondering). It's never quite been the same since I got a cell phone. It was very freeing to walk into the crowd and know that I was completely detached from everything except what was immediately around me.

antimagic• 12 years ago

I was actually going to post that this is exactly the feeling I get from going to music festivals - part of it is definitely the fact that you're cut off from the internet (at least in parisian music festivals, the network never works), but a big part of it is that for a few days you completely change routine. Note that I think that to get this experience you need to replace your daily life with something that installs a different routine, not just a void.

So, for music festivals, the routine becomes - choose which band you want to listen to, find a good spot in the crowd, relax in the sun, maybe drink a beer. A bit later on repeat for the next band. A bit later on try to find something to eat. You'll go through this routine many many times at a festival, enough that it becomes the new normal.

I regularly do trips to the US to visit Civil War battlefields. You get the same sort of experience. Get in the car, drive to your motel near the battlefield. Check in. Go to the national park, do the exhibitions at the Visitor Centre. Later, visit some of the key battle sites. Come back, find a restaurant. The next day come back, but this time go far a trail hike rather than worrying about the battlefield stuff. Back to hotel, find a restaurant. Next day, get in the car, drive to the next battle site.

The imprtant thing is the routine, specifically I seem to need to go through a cycle 5 - 10 times to get that sense of disconnect from the real world.

michaelochurch2• 12 years ago

Burning Man sounds like it was amazing before the corporates decide to wipe their dicks off on it and it became just another formerly-great thing ruined by rich asswipes.

blhack3• 12 years ago

It sounds like you wouldn't like it. Don't go.

randyrand• 12 years ago

YES! I get this feeling exactly. Not just from vacations, but from any big social setting/liyestyle changes.

Honestly detachment is a good way to put it. I feel detached from my past especially. Like I don't have a set identity. That I'm not the same person as my past,largely delineated by large setting/lifestyle changes.

Honestly, it's sort of a depressing way to look at yourself. Makes it hard to feel like you're actually building on something, working towards things.

Probably the worst case of this was when I first moved to college. About 4 weeks in I actually cried (I can count the times I've cried since teen-hood on one hand so it's rather rare) and I had no idea why at the time. It literally came out of no where. The strange part, I wasn't home sick at all. I had no desire to go home. No, it was closer to an identity crisis. I didn't feel attached to my past self. It was a really empty, lonely feeling.

If anything that i'm saying resonates with you, feel free to reach out =)

For what its worth, I consider myself to have an okay to good mental health. Depends on a lot of circumstances of course.

scrumper• 12 years ago

Yes: multi-day music festivals (very strongly); backpacking/camping vacations, where the routine becomes 'see new things, source food, find a place to sleep'; the first couple of weeks at home with a new baby; etc.

There is doubtless a term for this kind of dissociative experience. (It probably is 'vacation'; we've just forgotten how to take them properly in the Anglo Saxon world.)

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

There is a phenomenon that is fairly well documented and known among high-altitude mountain climbers, in which climbers high on the mountain develop a strong sense that they have a companion with them. They don't see anyone when they look around--it's not a visual hallucination--they just sort of know that there is another person there with them. The only reference I can think of off the top of my head is Greg Child, who wrote about it in his book "Mixed Emotions."

splawn2• 12 years ago

I wonder if that is related to what happens to people that wear the "god helmet". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

tcc2161• 12 years ago

I tend to wonder if our minds have a connection to Earth's magnetic field, perhaps using it as a sort of external hardrive at times, but if that was the case I wonder why the lunar astronauts didn't (literally) lose their minds.

One of the God Helmet scientists (Michael Persinger) hinted at that in one of his lectures I saw, a coincidental synchronicity with the planet's magnetic field, almost akin to the saltiness of our blood being the same as the oceans.

gohrt2• 12 years ago

This sounds a lot like the theory that humans used to have more separate brain hemispheres (pre- corpus colossum), and thus had a higher prevalence of schizophrenia (messages from the right side of the brain to the left, perceived as coming from "outside the self") which was interpreted as a voice of God.

splawn2• 12 years ago

Whoops. After reading my own link, I saw that the god helmet experiments have yet to be recreated. I had heard about it in a Dawkins Documentary and assumed that the science behind it was more solid than it actually is. My apologies for bringing hokeyness to this conversation.

gohrt2• 12 years ago

They also have severe oxygen deprivation, don't they?

bmm6o• 12 years ago

I thought I remembered this being called the "fourth man" or "fifth man", but the Googles aren't turning up anything relevant.

0x0• 12 years ago

I immediately had to re-watch this pretty awesome video after reading the article:

http://youtu.be/2aCOyOvOw5c

It goes from liftoff to space and back to earth in a handful of minutes, and the enhanced (but real) audio is pretty creepy.

dbcooper• 12 years ago

Mysterious, eh. How long have you spent on an airplane? 12hrs, 27hrs? Imagine how awful living in a space station must be.

Zikes• 12 years ago

If you read the article, you'll see that isolation and claustrophobia aren't necessarily involved.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

Something tells me they are going to get a lot bigger. Space hotels are coming and they will get to cruise liner standards pretty quickly. They will be the most exclusive of clubs and they will eventually have golf courses, though with some interesting dynamics due to the Coriolis effect.

Xcelerate• 12 years ago

Dissociation isn't just some feeling that you feel "separate" from everyone else. Rather, it's a very alien, unsettling mental state. If you want to see what it feels like, one way I know of that sometimes induces it is to stare at yourself in a mirror for a really long time. The effect is only temporary, but in some people it becomes permanent (in which case it becomes a psychological disorder).

stupidcar• 12 years ago

If anyone intends to try mirror gazing to induce a dissociative state, please be aware that it can also produce disturbing visual apparitions, particularly in low lighting: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20866001

spydum• 12 years ago

Wow had no idea this was a studied phenomenon. I remember be g a preteen and this was a popular party trick to freak people out (effective too, so I heard).

someguy23• 12 years ago

Yes, it is an extremely unsettling feeling. Head trauma can also cause it. This is something I experienced recently. For about a week I was disconnected with my body and reality, a feeling like my soul had lost touch with the world, and it is not something I ever want to experience again. The anxiety this feeling causes is almost unbearable. It's difficult to explain, but if anyone has experienced ketamine, I would relate it to that. Head injuries are weird, I am still recovering 7 weeks later, but I am recovering well.

dpflan• 12 years ago

Here is an excellent video about the overview effect: https://vimeo.com/55073825 (best watched on a (very) large screen)

tjradcliffe• 12 years ago

There was a moderate amount of speculation in mid-century SF on the possible psychological effects of space travel, the most extreme being "the Great Pain of Space" that figured in an early Cordwainer Smith story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain

When it turned out nothing quite so dramatic happened to the first space travelers, the idea was dropped, but it's certainly worth considering that less dramatic effects might yet have practical import in the future of human space travel.

bane• 12 years ago

I immediately thought about this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQenNw2s1cA

(continued here) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIJRoj2qwsc

When James May returns to the Earth it's obvious that he's had a very special experience.

"If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything."

mtdewcmu• 12 years ago

Not to be a wet blanket, but there doesn't seem to be anything mysterious about this side effect. I was expecting something different as a result of the sensational-sounding title: something truly hard-to-explain, not just having one's perspective expanded (quite literally).

jaekwon• 12 years ago

I can't tell if this article is mostly genuine, or whether it's meant to push all the buttons to sell more tickets for potential space travelers.

carlchenet• 12 years ago

the last video seems promising, except they skipped the landing part :)

drivingmenuts• 12 years ago

“From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’” -- Edgar Mitchell

Maybe we should be sending politicians into space.

The Mysterious Mental Side Effects of Traveling into Space

Related Stories