- I got an email that said,
"Hi. I am from the Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis University.
"Would you like to go in our space chair?"
Yes, yes I would.
- The lab does a whole variety of different things.
Space research, spatial orientation,
how does a person know where they are in space?
We also look at artificial gravity,
we look at human postural balancing,
sensory motor adaptation and processing,
we do some sorts of modelling as well,
and we've had a history of looking at motion sickness.
There's a lot that we don't know
about when does spatial disorientation happen
and how can we resolve it?
- That went wrong, that went wrong. Okay.
- The first question of this project is can we recreate essentially
what an astronaut would experience,
that sort of weak sense of gravitational cues and the spatial disorientation,
on Earth?
And the way we do it, is we put people into this beast, this machine,
we blindfold them so they can't use their visual system,
noise cancelling headphones so they can't use their auditory system.
They're just falling to the left and to the right.
And because they're tilting relative to gravity,
you can use information
about how you are relative to gravitational vertical
to figure out where you are.
You're getting this information a little bit through your
skin as you push against that seat,
but a lot through your vestibular system.
- And it's so easy to just over-correct and over... yep, there we go.
- If we want to know how the brain works in space flight,
we need to approximate the whole variety of conditions and forces
without limiting it to just one axis.
So we started designing a Multi-Axes Rotation and Tilt system,
which we call MARTS.
It became operational about 12 years ago,
and about 10 years ago we flew it on the Vomit Comet,
it was actually the biggest piece of equipment
and the heaviest that they flew.
- Okay, okay, okay, okay.
- What parabolic flight gives us is the ability to test, in close proximity,
several gravity-inertial force environments.
I flew a lot in zero G,
I probably have more zero G time clocked than some astronauts.
- So this chair is balanced on a metaphorical knife edge,
and my job is to keep it upright,
but I can't shift my body weight,
and I've got no cues from my eyes or my ears.
Instead, all I have is this joystick, and you know what?
I don't think I'm doing too badly at this.
- Your inner sense of balance is inside your inner ear,
and your otolith organs are these little hairs
that tell you how much you tilt.
In the upright, those hairs tilt the more you deflect
and you have a good sense of where you are.
When you're on your back,
the only thing that you really have through your canals
and even through your skin is velocity.
So I take the people and I tilt them until they're on their back,
and because I'm not tilting relative to gravity anymore,
you can't really use gravitational cues to figure out where you are,
and people become wicked spatial disoriented.
- Whoa, okay.
- You know, I put pilots inside there,
they don't know where they are, 90% of people have no idea.
And one of the core things I was very interested in
was how do people learn over time?
People in the upright who have a good sense of where they are,
I was curious, well, what does learning look like
even in that condition?
Because no one had even looked at that.
And so we took data and we 3D-printed each of the trials.
So this is trial one,
and this is going all the way up to trial 20.
And if you have huge circles, that means you're really bad.
And as time goes by, people learn.
In the beginning people come in and they're stressed out,
you know and what they do is they grasp that joystick
and they are just doing these crazy manoeuvres
thinking that they need to respond to every small thing.
Pretty rapidly, people are able to learn to do this task.
This is our spaceflight analogue task, this is when you're on your back.
You don't have gravitational cues that tell you about your angular position.
It is just a mess. People are in it for 40 minutes
and very very minimal learning.
There are some small things that they learn,
and that's what I use to create a training programme
that's actually effective.
And these red marks here are destabilising joystick deflections.
This is when you make a deflection of the joystick
that actually throws you away from the balance point.
Because you're kind of disoriented.
- Did I just steer into the floor?
- Based on what I've been looking at,
there are really two times that this happens.
One is just some weird freak thing,
where they're just like -- krushk! -- you know,
and who knows why that happens.
We need to study more, we want to do imaging and things like that.
But the second time it happens is timing.
People are doing this joystick deflection
and they sort of hold onto the joystick a little too long
and that becomes destabilising.
- This is impossible.
- I look at learning,
I look at how do you create effective training programmes,
and I also look at: can we do technological countermeasures
that can help people in that condition.
- Thank you to all the team
of the Spatial Orientation Laboratory
at Brandeis University.
Pull down the description for more about them
and their work.
That is genuinely impossible.
...I'm talking really loud.
[laughter]
Cool.