
The Mysterious Mental Side Effects of Traveling into Space - benbreen
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3036887/out-of-this-world-the-mysterious-mental-side-effects-of-traveling-into-space
======
blhack
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
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
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.

~~~
michaelochurch
This is really insightful.

I feel like a lot of the heavy drug use in our society comes from the fact
that so few people get to get away from the nonsense. The promise of drugs is
that your time between "real world mode" and detachment is 15 minutes instead
of several days. Of course, most of these drugs have supply-integrity and
dosage-certainty issues on account of being illegal, and are unpredictable at
best and dangerous at worst. I don't intend to say "drugs are bad", because I
think that research into the therapeutic potential of these compounds is 50
years behind where it should be, but most people don't know what they're doing
and are using them irresponsibly.

I've noticed that as I've gotten older I'm better at dropping into a detached,
almost Zen state... and ignoring the bullshit in "the real world". I've
learned that you can't let yourself get sucked into the bullshit, even if you
have to be at work. There's an almost sociopathic skill I've cultivated of
playing the role without caring. I need to be the subordinate? Fine, I'm a
paid actor. I've also worked to cultivate that ability to just focus on the
moment, in order to make weekends more useful or effective. A long (15+ mile)
bike ride can have that effect, or an outdoor meditation session, or just
having a purring cat sleep on top of me. Even if I get just 30 seconds of that
detachment, I consider it a success.

------
0x0
I immediately had to re-watch this pretty awesome video after reading the
article:

[http://youtu.be/2aCOyOvOw5c](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.

------
snowwrestler
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."

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

~~~
gohrt
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
Ah, bicameralism. I reposted a paper on that topic to HN a few days back that
you might find interesting.

------
Xcelerate
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
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](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20866001)

~~~
spydum
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).

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

------
tjradcliffe
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](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
I immediately thought about this video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQenNw2s1cA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQenNw2s1cA)

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

------
drivingmenuts
“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.

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

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

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

