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Language: en

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- I got an email that said,

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"Hi. I am from the Spatial Orientation
Laboratory at Brandeis University.

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"Would you like to go in our space chair?"

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Yes, yes I would.

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- The lab does a whole
variety of different things.

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Space research, spatial orientation,

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how does a person know
where they are in space?

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We also look at artificial gravity,

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we look at human postural balancing,

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sensory motor adaptation and processing,

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we do some sorts of modelling as well,

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and we've had a history of
looking at motion sickness.

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There's a lot that we don't know

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about when does spatial
disorientation happen

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and how can we resolve it?

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- That went wrong, that went wrong. Okay.

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- The first question of this project
is can we recreate essentially

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what an astronaut would experience,

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that sort of weak sense of gravitational cues
and the spatial disorientation,

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on Earth?

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And the way we do it, is we
put people into this beast, this machine,

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we blindfold them so they can't use
their visual system,

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noise cancelling headphones
so they can't use their auditory system.

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They're just falling to
the left and to the right.

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And because they're tilting
relative to gravity,

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you can use information

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about how you are relative
to gravitational vertical

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to figure out where you are.

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You're getting this information
a little bit through your

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skin as you push against that seat,

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but a lot through your vestibular system.

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- And it's so easy to just over-correct
and over... yep, there we go.

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- If we want to know how the
brain works in space flight,

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we need to approximate the
whole variety of conditions and forces

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without limiting it to just one axis.

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So we started designing
a Multi-Axes Rotation and Tilt system,

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which we call MARTS.

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It became operational about 12 years ago,

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and about 10 years ago we
flew it on the Vomit Comet,

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it was actually the
biggest piece of equipment

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and the heaviest that they flew.

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- Okay, okay, okay, okay.

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- What parabolic flight gives us is
the ability to test, in close proximity,

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several gravity-inertial force
environments.

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I flew a lot in zero G,

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I probably have more zero G time clocked
than some astronauts.

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- So this chair is balanced
on a metaphorical knife edge,

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and my job is to keep it upright,

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but I can't shift my body weight,

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and I've got no cues
from my eyes or my ears.

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Instead, all I have is this joystick,
and you know what?

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I don't think I'm doing too badly at this.

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- Your inner sense of balance
is inside your inner ear,

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and your otolith organs
are these little hairs

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that tell you how much you tilt.

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In the upright, those hairs
tilt the more you deflect

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and you have a good
sense of where you are.

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When you're on your back,

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the only thing that you really
have through your canals

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and even through your skin is velocity.

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So I take the people and I tilt them
until they're on their back,

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and because I'm not tilting
relative to gravity anymore,

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you can't really use gravitational cues
to figure out where you are,

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and people become wicked
spatial disoriented.

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- Whoa, okay.

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- You know, I put pilots inside there,

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they don't know where they are,
90% of people have no idea.

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And one of the core things
I was very interested in

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was how do people learn over time?

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People in the upright who have
a good sense of where they are,

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I was curious, well, what
does learning look like

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even in that condition?

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Because no one had even looked at that.

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And so we took data and we
3D-printed each of the trials.

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So this is trial one,

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and this is going all
the way up to trial 20.

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And if you have huge circles,
that means you're really bad.

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And as time goes by, people learn.

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In the beginning people come
in and they're stressed out,

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you know and what they do
is they grasp that joystick

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and they are just doing
these crazy manoeuvres

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thinking that they need to
respond to every small thing.

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Pretty rapidly, people are
able to learn to do this task.

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This is our spaceflight analogue task,
this is when you're on your back.

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You don't have gravitational cues
that tell you about your angular position.

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It is just a mess.
People are in it for 40 minutes

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and very very minimal learning.

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There are some small
things that they learn,

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and that's what I use to
create a training programme

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that's actually effective.

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And these red marks here
are destabilising joystick deflections.

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This is when you make a
deflection of the joystick

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that actually throws you
away from the balance point.

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Because you're kind of disoriented.

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- Did I just steer into the floor?

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- Based on what I've been looking at,

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there are really two
times that this happens.

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One is just some weird freak thing,

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where they're just like -- krushk! -- you know,

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and who knows why that happens.

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We need to study more, we want to
do imaging and things like that.

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But the second time it happens is timing.

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People are doing this joystick deflection

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and they sort of hold onto
the joystick a little too long

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and that becomes destabilising.

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- This is impossible.

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- I look at learning,

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I look at how do you create
effective training programmes,

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and I also look at: can we do
technological countermeasures

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that can help people in that condition.

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- Thank you to all the team

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of the Spatial Orientation Laboratory

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at Brandeis University.

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Pull down the description
for more about them

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and their work.

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That is genuinely impossible.

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...I'm talking really loud.

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[laughter]

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Cool.