Los cerebros de los científicos, ¿se encogieron un poco después de una estadía en la Antártida?

Socially isolated and faced with a persistently white polar landscape, a long-term team from an Antarctic research station saw a part of their brain shrink during their stay, according to a small study.

The crew of eight scientists and researchers and a cook lived and worked at the German research station Neumayer III for 14 months, though joining other scientists during the summer, the crew endured the long darkness of the polar winter alone, when temperatures can plummet down to -50° Celsius and evacuation is impossible. That social isolation and monotonous environment is the closest thing on Earth to what a space explorer might experience on a long mission, researchers say.

Animal studies have revealed that similar conditions can damage the hippocampus, an area of ​​the brain crucial for memory and navigation. For example, rats learn better when animals are housed with peers or in an enriched environment than when they are alone or in an empty cage But whether this is true for a person’s brain is unknown.

Scientists used magnetic resonance imaging to capture views of the team members’ brains before their polar sojourn and after they returned. On average, one area of ​​the hippocampus in the crew’s brain shrank by 7 percent over the course of the expedition, compared to healthy people of the same age and sex who did not stay on station.

But there are good reasons to believe that this change is reversible. While the hippocampus is highly vulnerable to stressors such as isolation, he says, it also responds very well to the stimulation that comes from a life full of social interactions and a variety of landscapes for explore.

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