Live at the Bell House: “The Space Between Your Ears” (Part 2)

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio! I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, and I've got two neuroscientists on the stage with me. We've been talking about the brain. And right now, I wanna talk about the mental health of astronauts. Why did you gasp? Oh my God, they could have problems? No, no, think this through, all right? Yeah. If there is ever a mission to Mars, and I'm working desperately on that right now. So, a mission to Mars, in the way we would do it, would take nine months. Then you gotta hang out there a year or two until Earth and Mars line up again, and then you come back. So a round trip is like three or four years. This is less time than it takes to make Chinese democracy. If that's really if a return mission is possible. Yeah, yeah, no, but let's assume it is. So I wanna ask the two of you, I've got some set of astronauts, let's say seven. They're in the same space for nine months and they're together for three years. Is that recipe for disaster? Ask 90210. Ask Gilligan. Ask the men that were on the Mars 500 mission. What was that? There was a mission that just took place in Russia, right? And it was a crew of men. In isolation. Yeah, in isolation for like, it wasn't 500, it was like 560 days or whatever, trying to see if you could have a group of people together and not kill each other. Well, I think it's hard to say, cause they came out. Wait, they either killed each other or they didn't. What do you mean, hard to say. They did not kill themselves. Okay. Or each other. So do you make it more interesting and have men and women assuming heterosexuality? You know, I think that this is a big part of the space program is bringing in psychologists and trying to figure out what is the best situation. And some people have proposed to have actual couples or families be the first explorers. So that... They can do it in space. And not burn each other with a fire. Right, yeah, have them. Going into space is a very, in terms of evolution, it's a very abnormal circumstance for people to be in isolation for so long. For those lengths of time. Not just isolation. I mean, there are a lot of things about space that are abnormal. And people could freak out. So I think what's really important is you have to seriously select people who have what it takes to withstand such extraordinary circumstances. If you flip out of space, you can't just get rid of them. I'm sure they're carrying Xanax with them. No, you can get rid of them. You can sedate them. But you have to do a lot of serious psychological testing because of very abnormal circumstances. Practically every sci-fi movie in the 60s, 70s, and 80s with long voyages, somebody goes berserk. And even when it's not a human, in 2001, the computer went berserk. And now on Bravo, all the real housewives go berserk. But what Heather just said I think is really important. She said, that's normal. And I think that sometimes my fear is that when we look for astronauts or cosmonauts with the right stuff, what we're really testing for is people's ability to suppress the crazy and to not show the crazy on the test. And really, is somebody who doesn't feel things and somebody who's actually very comfortable being in isolation for nine months and going into space, is that normal? Or isn't it more normal to process those emotions? Maybe we should be sending a shrink on the mission. I'll go. That might actually be quite helpful. If you haven't seen 2001, the computer becomes a homicidal maniac, basically. How? Like they do. How? These are the letters that precede IBM in the alphabet, in case you didn't know that. Did you know that the how font in 2001 is the same as the IBM font? It has these sort of lines through it. Mind informed. So how about this? If you're in space where no one can hear you scream. If you're in space where you turn out the lights, it is as dark as it gets. That's a kind of a sensory deprivation. And I read all about people going crazy or altering their mind state in sensory deprivation chambers. Is this a good thing, a bad thing? What is gonna keep them going for the nine months? What happens is our brain, it's made to take in stimuli and process it. And when it's devoid of external stimuli, it will create its own. And that's where these internal thoughts. And what's really interesting is that whether you actually see something physically out there or imagine it, it actually stimulates the same parts of the brain. It's very hard to distinguish whether a percept is being generated internally or externally. How do you judge then if it's stimulating the same part of the brain, whether you imagine it yourself or whether it's an external stimulus, if you have a few set of people on a voyage, at what point who's gonna say what is real and what is not? This is the problem also with schizophrenia. Because when we have 100 people, we can just take a vote. We should send seven schizophrenics into space with audio and visual hallucinations and make it a reality show. And then they'll, The Real Housewives of Outer Space. Schizo to the death. Schizophrenics believe they're hallucinations. With a person, let's say an astronaut, who's in space and who might, let's say, be having a visual auditory hallucination, the way to distinguish it is that if it was actually something external and real, everybody should be able to agree upon it. If it's an individual percept that's being developed in the own person's mind, only he would see it and the others wouldn't. That would be the reality check. You'd have to convince the person that they're the ones hallucinating. Yeah, and hopefully they're rational enough to think that I trust my fellow colleagues to tell me that this thing is not actually there. And hopefully multiple crew members aren't experiencing auditory. But the thing is, you wouldn't be experiencing the same thing. Same one, okay. The guys on the International Space Station, I interviewed two of the guys on the ISS about a month ago. Braggart. It was actually really cool. They were like floating in the interview. Well, I was in a space shuttle. I was, yeah. On Earth? Yeah, I went inside. That would be an Earth shuttle. Well, but it was, I got to go in Discovery. While it was on the ground. Once they shut the door, I don't know what happened. Okay, so they were floating around. They were floating around and I asked my readers to give me questions to ask them. And a bunch of people asked, when you dream in space, is the content of your dreams any different? And what's funny is I asked, I think, Donald Pettit this question and he was like, no. Science really is answering all the questions that 18 year old asks as they are called. As when they're high. Exactly. That is all of science. This is why I'm a neuroscientist. When I was five, I asked my dad, where do my thoughts come from? And you know, he said, they come from your brain. And I said, well, can I keep them when I die? And of course he had no answer for me, but I said, well, how do they come from my brain? How can I keep them? And this really motivated me to become a neuroscientist. There was an episode of The Twilight Zone. Oh. Where the daughter at age 18 asks her parents, mom, dad, how come there are no pictures of me as a young child? And she would later learn that they manufactured her. And so when you say to your father, where do my thoughts come from? I imagine him saying, we hand them to you. Wait, so dad is God? That's very Fordian. So back to 2001, Space Odyssey. So first Hal goes crazy, kills everybody. Then Dave, at the end, he's tripping. There's no other explanation for what's going on there. There's like colors. Remember, it is the 1960s that this film was made. And so is there a state of mind where you're just tripping because your brain is creating its own chemicals to do that? Yes, it's a natural reaction. Actually, that would be what we would predict what would happen if somebody has been so sensory deprived and socially deprived for so long. The brain's innate response will be to create its own stimulation. And that will look something like along the lines of a trip. And even just thinking about here on Earth, the concept of the universe, it gets really trippy after a while. And you have to kind of then say, I can't think about that. I'm gonna refocus on, you know, what's the latest thing on, you know, E-news, for example. I'm gonna just listen to Pink Floyd. You know, I need to distract myself because it's so outside the realm of our innate experience or even thinking about the concept of neural mortality. It gets too freaky that you need to say, oh, I'm gonna play Xbox now. So the brain's reaction is to do something else to distract itself. Okay, so forgive my persistent reference to the Twilight Zone, but there are other episodes where they show an astronaut alone, then he starts freaking out because he was deprived of human interaction. Since then, I have come to find people who don't want any human interaction at all. They're perfectly happy not saying anything to anybody forever. Well, they'd be great going to MIT or being an astronaut. So since they exist. I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. I love MIT. They don't exist. Truth is, this is the hyperbolic view. These people don't exist. It's very rare for somebody to never have any interaction. Not with the mailman, not with somebody at a store nearby. Even people who kind of have agoraphobia and don't leave their houses very often are often obsessive about doing things online. You see it in prisons when you put people in isolation. And that happens. What we were just talking about happens. If you're thrown in the hole, do you have those hallucinations? A lot of them attempt suicide in that situation and they do it in a very violent way because they don't have anything to attempt suicide with because it's just that frustrating to lose the sense of who you are. Well, this is why isolation chambers are in prison are the worst form of punishment. The worst thing you can do to a person is not put them behind bars, but put them in solitary confinement. I mean, Paris Hilton went crazy, right? They put her in prison and they had to like- Did she go crazy or had she already been? That's a very good question. But the worst thing you can do to a person is isolate them from other people. All right, so getting back to astronauts then. There's a famous astronaut case, Lisa Novak, okay? She was an astronaut on STS-121 space shuttle to the International Space Station, July 2006. She was a mission flight engineer. So she was 13 days in space, okay? Another astronaut, her lover, who she went to return to, but he then fell in love with somebody else, an engineer from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Astronauts live in Houston, by the way. Did the same thing not happen with the band Fleetwood Mac? So, she comes back from her mission, drives 900 miles from Houston to Orlando. Well... Disney World? Yeah, perhaps. She wore a diaper. That's how desperate she was to not stop. So now, is she up to no good? Let's find out what she was in possession of. She had a black wig, a tan trench coat, a BB pistol, ammunition, pepper spray, a two-pound drilling hammer, an eight-inch folding knife, rubber tubing, latex gloves, and plastic garbage bags. And a Fergie album. Just on repeat. The secret member of the A-Team. She waited for her ex-boyfriend's lover to show up at the airport parking lot and was not able to do whatever she planned to do with that assortment of materials. Make an installation? What's going on in her head? She's homicidal, derived from love, presumably. It's love, I guess. I think it's like-like. So what I'm getting at is people fall in love, but that's kind of extreme, though. And so we wonder, is it because she was in space and something happened? This doesn't seem normal to me. What we will do is end this segment and devote segment four to the chemistry of love. When we get back to StarTalk Radio from the Bell House. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. The subject is The Space Between Your Ears, lots going on there, and we couldn't have this episode of StarTalk without some discussion about the brain chemistry of love. Yes. So Cara, tell me about the chemistry of love. We learned in the previous segment that there was an astronaut who kind of went berserk by any normal measure of behavior in a breakup of a relationship. The only example of someone acting weird while being in love. Okay, so question to you. Is that normal? Is that exotic? Is it because she was in space? What's going on here? I think that everybody in this room, everybody listening in their own homes right now, who has experienced love or however they choose to define love, has done something bat crazy in the name of love. I like the person who just went, hell yeah. So wait, bat crazy while being in love or bat crazy when they lose their love? Either way, I think that love is a very intense emotion for a lot of people, and people have very intense behavioral experiences linked to it, and her brand of crazy, this is the astronaut Lisa Nowak, is probably more deeply based in mental illness than somebody else's brand of crazy. But you know, love does mimic these certain brain pathways that involve a lot of different neurochemicals, and it really mimics in many ways a brain pathway that's similar to the one in addiction. And we find sometimes that during an intense break up, that mimics the symptoms of withdrawal. So it's not that we want the person or that we miss the person, it's that we physically need that person. The same way. So you can track the chemical. Exactly. You need the methadone of love. The methadone of love, yeah. I'm the methadone of love. You gotta say it with the Barry White version. Methadone of love. The methadone of love. I'm not flirting with you, Neil. Which is why you know a lot of people, when you're trying to get over a breakup, your good friends recommend that you kind of get out there a little, you know, distract yourself. Because sometimes, yes, you do need the methadone of love. What better way to get off heroin than cocaine? In short bursts with no commitment. Or methadone, which actually does help you get off of heroin. We study people with these behavioral addictions, like pathological gambling or compulsive shopping, which are behavioral addictions that are devoid of any injection. I have to ask, in the world of the study of people who are addicted to shopping, what percent are men? Ah, that's really interesting. It's actually more prevalent in women, but more prevalent in men to be pathological gamblers. So you can choose- I just want a number. How many pathological shoppers are men? I cannot give you an exact number at this time. These rules make women shop and men gamble, so it's 60% is the answer for both. All right, go on. I did a study last night as I was falling asleep. So, devoid of any chemical ingestion, people can be addicted to certain behaviors, to certain highs that they get. Your brain is making the chemicals itself. Exactly, the brain is making them themselves. So you win a lot of money in a gamble and you get a high from that. You get a kiss from your lover and you get a high from that. Okay, I've been on mountaintops. Yes. It is dark. I am above the clouds. Are you an astronaut? No, one does not need to go into orbit to get above the clouds. I and the telescope are alone in the dark of night, drinking in the cosmos. I don't want to hear the rest of the story. I feel a cosmic passion that is not equaled in any other activity. Am I in love with the universe? Yes, you are, you are. You're addicted to the universe. Congratulations. No, but there's some people who are in love with what they do. They're in love with the universe. They're in love with studying neuroscience, and that's an addiction. If you can't do it, if I said you cannot study space for the next year, you might go through withdrawal. So this love chemical, it doesn't have to be human. It could be objects. It could be an object that actually harks back to psychoanalytic ideas that you can fall in love with the object. It might be a person. It might be a parent. It might be a thing. A really cool hat. A cool hat. Exactly. So that's a chemical. So now we were chatting earlier and you were telling me that there's the chemical that is raging when there's just lust. Sure. Okay. That's not love. That's just sex. Well, there's an anthropologist, an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher, who's also studied the neurobiology of love. And she claims that there are three stages to love. There's the lust stage. There's the attachment stage. And there's the commitment stage. And what we see is that what's happening in the brains of people when they're first falling in love, when they're very sexually active, when they're lusting after one another, is very different than what we see in the brains of people who have been together. And are married. And the funny thing is, is that what we see is that there are similarities in this lust stage to drug addiction. And there are similarities in this commitment stage to what you would see between like mother and child, which is an intense bonding, which involves hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin. Whereas earlier, we're seeing hormones like dopamine, which is involved in the reward pathway. Okay, and the breakup is the withdrawal. Is the withdrawal from this. So what if you lust after somebody while you're on drugs? I know what's pretty interesting is Helen Fisher claims that people who are taking SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are antidepressants. People who are taking SSRI, she feels don't have the neural capacity to fall as deeply in love than those who aren't. I completely disagree with this statement, by the way. But it's a powerful tool to make someone feel terrible in a relationship. No, your problem is you can't feel love. I'm right. But we do know that if you're going through a breakup and you take an SSRI for a short period of time, it can actually help relieve some of those symptoms that are making you very depressed. And by the way, this isn't just about sexual love. We joke about losing the one that you love and it's sending you into a feeling of withdrawal, but how many of us have lost a parent or a sibling? You very much have experienced... Or a TV show. Or a television show. I mean, and you have this feeling like I need them back, or it, back in my life. Can we distinguish love that involves sensuality from love that involves caring? Is it just that we happen to use the same word and we just need a different word for it? You know, I think that all love involves caring, if we're going to classify it as love. For example, I think it's in Spanish, where there's a different word for the love of a god that you would have for the love of a person. I think Greek. It's Greek. It's agape. Yeah, there's the Greek word agape is like the love for a god. So, is it just because we don't have enough vocabulary to distinguish these different kinds of affection? Well, also, you know, something that... So we just call it love. This is interesting because around Valentine's Day, I had some people getting in contact with me. I had written a whole series about love a few months ago on my column, and they were asking, you know, what are the chemical components of love and what's exactly happening in the brain and where does it light up? But does this really tell the whole story of what love is? I mean, trying to discuss these things scientifically, does it really take the poetry out of love? And I think that this is a very subjective experience, love, and all of the research that's done on love is done on people who claim that they are in love. There's really no way to measure what love is. No, there might be. Kara is asserting that we can't measure love, but I'm gonna assert. I did not say that. Different people say they're in love, and then you hook them up. I mean, electronically, yes, okay. If each of them believes they're in love, okay, and then you analyze their brain. If the same part of every person's brain is lit with the same kind of chemistry, then we can say, yes, they're in love. So there's certain experiments which show that, for example, you take a man and you put him on a very high bridge. It's very exciting. He's maybe nervous, you know, it's a suspension bridge. And he's walking along and he meets a woman. The chances are if he meets her on this very high, exciting bridge, that he'll be more attracted to the woman than if he meets her on the ground. It's like the movie Speed. That's why I opened the nightclub on the Verrazano Bridge. It's why when strangers hold hands and jump off a bridge, they fall in love. It's very exciting. Wait, are you saying that the man who is stimulated in some kind of extreme setting will find other women more attractive than would otherwise be the case? There was like a dating show on network television that the whole thing was like they would send people on dates and make them like bungee jump or something like that. And it was like, try to figure out like, will they work it out? Or will they just wait six weeks until they can go back to California? So is it only the man who feels this way? It's both the man and the woman. So people are, for example, more likely to think they fall in love like if they meet at the gym. So the point is this, that if you're aroused, whether it be for any external stimulus, whether it's because you're on a high bridge or you're physically exercising and all your endorphins are sort of pumped up, you'll rationalize, you'll come up for explanations. You want to attribute this to what's happening in your environment. So you say, I feel excited. It must be because I'm attracted to this woman or man. So it sounds like the best way to set up, like if you want to match make some people, is to like put them in a room together and then mug them. Yeah, no. Yes, yes. But you know what's actually really interesting about this is you're speaking to that neurologically, but when we compare kind of statistical data of people who have fallen in love and actually stayed in love over the long term, some of the highest predictors of long term love are things like proximity. We are most likely to fall in love with somebody who we see all of the time. It's most common that people fall in love with somebody who lives in their neighborhood or works in their work, and also people who look like ourselves or look like our parents. Don't say that. It's transference. All right, so people have invested a lot of brain energy in trying to figure this out. Are this the dating services do this now? Helen Fisher actually does work with match.com. So consults with them. Because she can use their data. There's so much data out there of these people and these experiences, and she does a lot of studies using that. There's one more element that's just a bit outside of the brain. There's something called the amino-histocompatibility complex. They do studies of long-term relationships that find that people who are attracted to each other, when they look at their immune system, have complementary immune system. So there is a chemistry of love. There is a chemistry of love. Wait, what does that mean, complementary immune system? That means like, what makes me get sick doesn't make what you get sick, and what makes you get sick doesn't make me get sick. And so if we combine our- So you can tongue kiss and not injure each other. Well, when you kiss, one idea is that you're actually exchanging genetic information. So a lot of motivating us is this sort of underlying, if our genes are compatible. So is it true then, based on what you just said, that other than that kind of opposite element, it's not otherwise true that opposites attract? Opposite immune system. That's the famous quote. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're continuing the broadcast of our show, The Space Between Your Ears, recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York on February 17th, 2012. Along with my co-host, Eugene Mermin, joining us on stage that night, were Professor of Psychology, Heather Berlin, and science blogger, Kara Santa Maria, and the comedian, Wyatt Sinak. What's interesting is that Heather, when she was talking about this idea of people falling in love on the bridge, she was saying they fall in love because of this heightened experience. Are these people really falling in love, Heather, or are they mistaking this intense kind of neurochemical experience for love? So there's a difference between, as you said, the immediate lust, the passion, which you might describe or label as love. Your physiology is all excited, and you might label that, oh, I must be in love with this person. And there's a difference between that and then the long-term commitment, when all those sort of exciting, immediate feelings die down. So you go to phase two. Phase two, commitment, that's a different type of thing. And it's in a totally different part of the brain. Yes. So what about the stereotype that guys never commit? Are they missing these chemicals? Actually, I just talked to Helen Fisher, and she said that it seems like, based on the data, that women have a harder time committing. That guys are more likely to want to get married early on than women are. And girls are more likely to insist. You're not sure what somebody's saying? I don't know if you've heard his science, he's like, nah. The difference here is that women tend to be more selective than men. So when you say, not true, not true, women want to commit and men don't, it's because women are finding the person that they want to commit to. Like it's most likely when you ask a woman, she's got like four guys that have, at some point in their lives, wanted to marry her, but she didn't want to marry them back. So she was waiting until she found the one who she really wanted to marry. And then that's where she goes in for the commitment. Exactly. Where's the guy? Always wants to commit and just always says he doesn't. I don't know what the control groups are in this, but I think they're both being... One really interesting statistic is that the highest rate of divorce is either in the first year of marriage, meaning... Or the last. No! I'm just guessing. There's nothing you can say. There's no way I'm wrong. Whatever the answer is, it's a version of what I said. The highest rated divorce is in the first year of marriage, meaning when that lust phase wears off, and you realize, what am I doing with this person? Or in the 25th year of marriage, meaning when the children that you have leave the house. Yeah, exactly. And so, people are together initially for this lust. They stay together with children, and it's actually really a rarity that it lasts beyond the point in which the children leave the nest. And those are the exceptions rather than the rule, which makes a bit of sense. Well, that makes sense, yeah, because you're meeting that person for the first time again without children. Like, you spent all your time focused on like, we gotta get this hungry, awful person out of this house so we can relax again. You're gonna make a great dad. So, let me bring it back to a Mars mission. So, you say proximity, proximity breeds lust and love. And you say complimentary immune systems breed chemical compatibility. So, I got my seven astronauts. Put men and women, heterosexual, homosexual, doesn't matter, some of them are gonna fall in love, they're gonna wanna have sex. Okay, fine, zero G sex. Yeah. Yeah, a COG the whole way, and you have to like brush up on your laws of physics to do that. I think they have like a suit that they've developed. Yeah, cause otherwise you're careen off the wall. Does Viagra work in outer space? I'm just asking. Is it mostly on the inside, I believe? All right, now it turns out that if you got on board the fastest spaceship we have ever launched and aimed it towards the next star system, it would take you 50,000 years to get there. So, if you wanna send people to the next star, they have to be really fertile. Yes. Yes, okay, so you have to start making babies, they get raised, they become the next generation, and it just continues, and 30 generations down the line, they land. If they undergo normal sort of relational activities, there's a chance that- The word is sex, right? Doing it. The chance you can sustain this, is that what you think it would need in order to sustain stability of this crew for the four years. Yes, I think at this point, it becomes a situation where you're, it's an apocalyptic situation. You're talking about populating this new area. You're not talking about love and commitment. I'm going to disagree. I believe if I'm not wrong, what you're saying is the only way we could effectively get to another star system is to send an orgy into space. Right, and here's another interesting thing. You can ask, perhaps you can make a machine that would incubate the human embryo from conception to birth. And you would do it because it's more efficient and you'd save on weight. But then you weigh the machine and you find out the machine weighs like 120 pounds, right? Well, that's what the woman weighs. The women are baby machines. If you cannot make an incubator that weighs less than the woman that would have incubated the child, there's no use for a machine to do so. Wait, but there might be. Finally replacing machines with women. I would prefer to incubate a child in a machine than in my body any day. I think there is still a use for the machine. Because your tattoos would take on a whole other geometry. I think what you're forgetting is that the woman might not want to be physically carrying a child in space. She might want to be doing work. Well, at zero G, you're not carrying it. It's just floating there. Yeah. Still. And you would be just throwing up in the morning in a way that would be fine. Zero G vomit is not a problem. Zero G vomit, that's really bad. Yeah, it's really bad. So right there, that's your reason for the machine. You had an objection. What was it? Well, I mean- Oh, I don't know, Neil. What could be objection? First of all, it takes nine months, right, to make a baby. And so it's gonna be really- It only takes two seconds to make a baby. Everything I learned in sex ed. But the whole rationale was not about having sex for pleasure, but really just to populate this new place. You want to economize. And now with new technology, you can harvest eggs. You can have artificial insemination. So you can do a process where you have a bunch of just surrogates. Yeah, a farm. Surrogates on board. You know, maybe there's certain genes you wanna breed for, so you get, you know, whatever it is, musicians or whatever it is. Really useful stuff. All fighting about who's the drummer. Maybe some could be food for the robot harvesters. Just the sperm of musicians or scientists or whoever it is, whatever trait it is you want, you take that sperm, you take those eggs, and then you have surrogates or carriers that you can inseminate, you know, multiple women at the same time. And then by the time they get there, there's gonna be a whole new population. Okay, here's my concern, because what started this is the psychological stability of human beings. If this is the conduct on the ship, and that's not going on on Earth, that's a neurological experiment. So let's try it on Earth first, and then we can bring it to outer space. We know what happens when you put a band together. I don't think we're going to another star system, 50,000 years is longer than civilization has been around, and that's an experiment I don't think anyone is gonna do. Going to Mars, that's four years, Russians have set records for being in space, not quite that long, but a large fraction of that time, so there's some hope that you don't go completely crazy. And Mars has 40% of Earth's gravity, so you don't have the zero-geap long-term problem once you get there, 40% is fine. And so the issue then is, do you set up a mini-Earth situation to sustain people's emotional stability? Would you allow them to create some other world for themselves? As long as it's effective. Like, you can't send seven people having their own dreams into space because they have to operate stuff. They gotta push buttons and stuff. But I think you look at the time it took for us to evolve to where we are now, and really, compared to that very short time it is that you'll be sending people into outer space, you're going to have to simulate things that we're comfortable with here on Earth. And that's the psychologist's job in that role, to advise on this. Absolutely. So the future of NASA needs psychiatrists, psychology. Absolutely. They're not gonna have time enough to develop a whole new psyche that's gonna evolve to adapt to what it feels like to be in outer space. It's not gonna be enough time. You don't have that luxury to do that. They're gonna have to create environments which simulate the things that they're used to here on Earth. Yeah, and in fact, there are a few astronauts that want to maintain the comforts of home. So the food selection includes comfort foods. There's meatloaf, mashed potatoes. And so they're already kind of there, thinking about what is home-like for the astronauts. But if you take it down a notch, just think about international travel. If I travel to Japan, let's say, I'm in a plane for 14 hours, I get to this new land, it almost feels like another planet. And the thing that makes me feel most comfort is I want a comfort food. It would be great to have a piece of pizza. That makes me feel psychologically grounded and stable. That's why there's so much science involved in Jersey Shore. Like the scientists really had to figure out, like we need to put them in a place that's comfortable for them, and give them food that is comfortable to them so they all don't ape out and just beat the crap out of them. So in fact, that is another planet, is what you're saying. So basically, we're preparing them to go to space. They're the people, they've been together for like four years now. That's who's going to Mars is the cast of Jersey Shore. Mars is in for a treat. Mars is in for a treat. So if we bring up the house lights, it's time to go to Q&A. Yeah. Sir, what do you have? You guys were talking earlier about can a computer essentially become conscious? What is that extra bit of? Once a computer wants to do it, it's alive. What is the extra amount of information and maybe like that spark? Okay, Heather. There's a really hot theory now in the world of the neural basis of consciousness called the integrated information theory of consciousness, IIT. And basically what it says is that any system, whether it be a brain or a computer that has a high degree of integrated, differentiated information will in some sense have the property of consciousness. That's a very highly debated argument, but it says, for example, if you look at a camera, one pixel is on or off, it won't affect the pixel next to it. But if a neuron is on or off, it will affect the neuron next to it. And that would be a high degree of integration of information. The bit is on, that means that bit is off. So the greater level of complexity and integration of information substantiated in any kind of matter would create consciousness. I'm your host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're continuing the broadcast of our show, The Space Between Your Ears, recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York on February 17th, 2012. Along with my co-host, Eugene Mermin, joining us on stage that night were Professor of Psychology, Heather Berlin, science blogger, Kara Santa Maria, and the comedian, Wyatt Sinak. So now Q&A on our special StarTalk broadcast, our third from the Bell House. Sir, yes. A disturbing number of tonight's topics were redolent of this week's hysteria in the Congress about allowing women to serve in the military. They were talking about groups of men in relative isolation in states of protracted arousal and agitation, and apparently the way they coped with this was through increased amounts of sexual assault on women. So considering that it was Newt Gingrich talking about space travel now, I think the military to space travel analogy does not bode well. So, interesting point, can you ladies react to this? I mean, men behaving badly. Well, I think that... May I add the word very? I think that the idea here is that when we're talking about space travel, a lot of these organizations like NASA are trying to figure out how to make space travel more normal, more kind of reminiscent of what we're experiencing on Earth, and I think that the idea of sending soldiers into battle is to strip as much of that humanity out of them as possible during that training, and to make it so that these individuals are trained to be able to actually engage in combat which we don't experience in our regular day-to-day affairs. And so, I mean, if the idea here is to bring our families along, or if it's just to bring women, and women already serve in the military, and they're in many of these areas, but specifically what we're talking about is arming them? Well, no, I think the argument here is the idea that men who are serving are in isolation, and that's going to increase their likelihood of, you know, they're sexually deprived, let's say they're away from their families, that if you introduce women in this situation, that they're going to be more likely to act out. No, but Kara's point is not simply that they're isolated, you have trained killers in a situation that's not in everyday circumstance, put into the isolated. Yeah, and this isn't a controlled study. Don't most astronauts have military background? In the old days, in the old days, they were fighter pilots. Not anymore, in the old days, they were all military. A lot of them, they're school teachers now, then like, in firemen and stuff. This is very rock star. This is not a controlled scientific study, so there are confabulating variables here. Is it the aggression from the training that is causing more rape, or is it because they are not around enough women? And the truth is, at that point, I think that we need more oversight of these men. That's the real problem. It's not, should we surround them with more women or less women? Can I suggest this, though? When I study people with impulse control disorders, what makes us uniquely human and different from other types of animals is that we do have this large prefrontal cortex that allows us to inhibit these innate behaviors. I want to rape, I want to grab that piece of chocolate cake right now. But then you have the idea, there's long-term- Grape chocolate cake, that was in the same sentence? Well, they're urgent. This audience has done a great job not having sex with each other and watching us. And I commend you. The thing that makes us human, and we're able to understand long-term consequences and inhibit those innate desires. You know what, I have this urge to have the piece of chocolate cake, but I know I'm on a diet and I want to lose weight, so I won't. You're overcoming the lizard brain. Exactly, overcoming the lizard brain. And I don't see why soldiers shouldn't be able to do the same thing that we all do every day. Let's go to the next question, yes. Could you look at what happened with our crazed astronaut, maybe falling in love with another astronaut, arguably one of the most, maybe not dangerous anymore, but very high-risk, high-reward type job, and that really affecting her psyche and why she believed she loved this man the way she did? Yes. I mean, if the question is, could we imagine that affected her psyche, yeah. I think we have to all agree. Just so we understand the question. So the question was, to be an astronaut in the first place is to accept a high-risk, high-danger job. And that is a selection filter that creates a kind of form of mind that might be susceptible to this behavior. Actually, a month or so ago, I went to this great science convention and we were having a conversation about people with the right stuff. These astronauts that are chosen for missions and it sometimes makes me wonder, is our selection of the right stuff too similar to the selection of the right stuff for, you know, a soldier? Shouldn't we actually be looking for people that have more nuance to their psychology? I'm gonna pull some weight here now. So I was talking to Buzz Aldrin. Fine. From outer space. From outer space. I know him. And what was really interesting to me is he said after he came back from walking on the moon, he developed depression. We once went to the moon. Yes, we did. He had a boater for two months straight. He developed depression after that, severe depression. Now you could say it might have been in his genes and he was predisposed to that. But if you think about the creative geniuses that we've had, there's a higher rate of depression and other psychiatric illnesses and people who are creative artists. So there might be this type of people who are these adventurers, these sensation seekers who wanna go walk on the moon. There might be an abnormality to that. That's not a normal thing. Most normal people don't wanna walk on the moon. I'm also gonna pull some weight. I was talking to the Wookie Chewbacca, and he said, I can't argue with that. I believe that if you were to take away someone's experience of walking on the moon, they would totally be bummed out for some period of time. It's a real like buzzkill. Yeah. When you get back to her. That's it for Star Talk Radio. Thank you all. You've been listening to Star Talk Radio, funded in part by the National Science Foundation. As always, we compel you to keep listening.