Space travel

A new strand of research, opening up alongside the psychedelics work. The broad question is what happens to selfhood and experience when a body is taken out of the gravity it evolved in. What do people notice. How do they make sense of it. What do they bring back with them.

Our perceptual machinery is calibrated to 1G. Lift that constraint, even briefly, and a lot of what quietly underwrites ordinary experience comes into view. People who’ve been in microgravity often describe it as one of the most extraordinary things a human being can go through, and frequently struggle to put it into words. That difficulty is itself interesting. It’s the kind of difficulty I’ve heard from participants in my ayahuasca work, and I suspect the methodological care it asks for is similar too.

The first study: experiences of weightlessness in parabolic flight

The first study sits inside the GRAVITY project (Gravitational Reliability And Vestibular Inference in Transient microgravitY) at Birkbeck. Professor Elisa Ferrè at the Vestibular & Space Neuroscience Lab leads it as Principal Investigator. The qualitative arm is an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study designed by Professor Jonathan A. Smith, my PhD supervisor; I’m running it. Quantitative work runs in parallel.

I’ll be interviewing flyers new to parabolic flight shortly after their flight, while the experience is still fresh. The research question is deliberately open: how do participants experience weightlessness during a parabolic flight, and what sense do they make of it? No assumption that it has to be transformative or disorientating, or anything in particular. The point is to give space for what people actually find there.

Why this approach

Most of what’s known about weightlessness comes from quantitative neuroscience and aerospace medicine. Both are essential, and neither is set up to capture what participants find meaningful or hard to put into words. There’s a growing theoretical case that microgravity acts as a non-pharmacological perturbation to the brain’s “1G super-prior”, with phenomenology that may overlap psychedelic states. The lab works in an experiential-neuroscience frame: combining first-person accounts with neural and behavioural measures so the picture each method builds is fuller than either reaches alone. The IPA study contributes the first-person side.

If you’re working in a related area, do get in touch.