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An Edited Transcript from my Presentation at the 2025 Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics
My journey toward aerospace medicine began in an far-off place. As a chiropractor who specialized in neurological disorders, I never imagined my career would lead me toward space exploration. Yet the connections between seemingly disparate fields often yield the most profound insights.
During my fellowship in neurodevelopmental disorders, I studied children with autism who frequently exhibited poor balance and spatial awareness—classic vestibular issues. This observation led me to pursue specialized training in vestibular rehabilitation, where I learned techniques to help these children navigate their sensory world more effectively.
As my research expanded into inflammation, nutrition, and brain injury rehabilitation, I began noticing striking parallels between my patients' symptoms and those experienced by astronauts returning from space missions. This realization sparked a collaboration that would transform my understanding of human physiology both on Earth and beyond.
I've become what you might call a scientific Swiss Army knife—not a specialist in one narrow field, but someone who can connect dots across multiple disciplines. This unique perspective allows me to approach the challenges of space travel with a holistic understanding of how our bodies respond to the absence of Earth's most fundamental force: gravity.
To truly appreciate the challenges of space exploration, we must first understand how deeply gravity has shaped our evolution. For 4.3 billion years, life on Earth has developed under constant gravitational influence. This force hasn't merely determined our physical structure; it has fundamentally integrated itself into our neural architecture and biochemical processes.
The story begins roughly one billion years ago with the Hydromedusa, the first animal to develop a gravity-sensing mechanism. Its tentacles contained mechanical transducers capable of detecting vibrations and energy patterns in water. This primitive system gave the creature a crucial survival advantage—the ability to orient itself in its environment.
Approximately 300 million years later, jellyfish evolved the statocyte cell—essentially nature's first level indicator. Picture a cell containing starch granules that settle at the bottom due to gravity, providing the organism with directional information. This brilliant adaptation allowed jellyfish to determine whether they were swimming upward, downward, or horizontally.
The evolutionary timeline continued with the lungfish developing structures remarkably similar to our modern vestibular system about 435 million years ago. Fossilized exoskeletons reveal three semicircular canals and two otolithic structures—the basic architecture that persists in the human inner ear today.
Perhaps most fascinating is that by 200 million years ago, the Brazilian quadrilodon—one of Earth's first mammals—possessed virtually identical vestibular structures to those in our ears. This system was so perfectly adapted to Earth's gravitational environment that it has remained essentially unchanged for 200 million years—a testament to its evolutionary importance.
In the hierarchy of human development, the vestibular system holds a position of primacy. It is the first sensory system to form during embryonic development, appearing just seven weeks after conception—before taste, smell, hearing, or vision. High-definition ultrasound studies reveal that around this seven-week mark, embryos begin making seemingly random twitching movements. These movements appear to provide crucial sensory feedback through the nascent vestibular apparatus, driving proper nervous system development.
The vestibular system's influence extends far beyond simple balance and orientation. Unlike our other sensory systems, which have dedicated processing areas in the brain, vestibular information is integrated throughout our neural architecture. This unique arrangement emerged during human evolution, marking a significant distinction between our species and other primates.
The vestibular system's extensive connectivity creates a complex web of influence across virtually every critical area of the central nervous system. From the left vestibular nucleus alone (mirrored on the right side), we see connections to:
This elaborate network creates a hierarchical processing system that manages everything from basic postural reflexes to complex cognitive operations. On Earth, gravity serves as what scientists call a strong "Bayesian prior"—an implicit assumption that shapes how our brains interpret all other sensory information. When this reference point disappears in space, the consequences ripple through every level of this hierarchy.
My background in treating brain injuries revealed an unexpected connection to space medicine. The symptoms experienced by patients with mild traumatic brain injury bear striking resemblance to those reported by astronauts during and after space missions:
Both conditions also show elevated levels of proteins like GFAP, UCHL1, neurofilament light, and S100 beta, indicating stress and injury to the nervous system through various mechanisms.
Although brain injuries and space-related symptoms arise from fundamentally different mechanisms—the former from diffuse axonal shearing causing physical neural damage, and the latter from the absence of gravity—their striking similarities offer valuable insights for developing targeted interventions. These parallel manifestations, revealed through identical biomarker patterns, suggest common downstream pathways that could inform both terrestrial and extraterrestrial medical approaches.
In the absence of gravity's constant input, our brains must work significantly harder to maintain spatial orientation and basic functions. Nobel laureate David Kahneman's capacity model of attention helps explain this phenomenon: our attention system operates like a limited resource pool, similar to a phone battery with finite energy to distribute across various tasks.
On Earth, gravity provides a reliable reference point that allows our brains to process spatial information efficiently. In space, this efficiency breaks down, forcing astronauts to allocate more conscious attention to tasks that would normally be automatic. It's comparable to the difference between navigating a familiar room with the lights on versus feeling your way through that same room in complete darkness.
This increased cognitive load manifests in measurable changes to brain activity patterns. In microgravity, we observe:
These changes present serious concerns for long-duration space missions, where astronauts must maintain optimal cognitive function while operating complex, expensive equipment in life-threatening situations.
Traditional understanding of vestibular function focuses narrowly on balance and spatial orientation. However, when researchers take a wider, more corollary view, we begin to observe that disruptions to this system cascades into numerous unexpected problems:
This expanded understanding may explain why astronauts experience such a wide range of symptoms during space travel. It also highlights why an interdisciplinary approach to space medicine is essential—no single medical specialty can address the full spectrum of physiological changes induced by microgravity.
A fascinating aspect of space travel often overlooked in conventional medicine involves electrical grounding. Earth essentially functions as a negatively charged body, while space exposes astronauts to positively charged particles moving at tremendous speeds. On our home planet, we naturally discharge this electrical activity through contact with the ground, but in space, this electrical accumulation leads to oxidative stress and DNA damage.
This understanding connects to emerging research on "earthing" or grounding practices, which have shown benefits for inflammation, sleep quality, and recovery from exercise. In space, the absence of this natural discharge mechanism represents another fundamental challenge to human physiology.
While technology can address some issues—air filtration systems for managing CO₂ levels, grounding rods for electrical discharge—two major obstacles remain: radiation exposure and gravity's absence. A round trip to Mars would expose astronauts to radiation equivalent to living in Chernobyl for 68 years, while simultaneously depriving them of the gravitational force that regulates everything from gene expression to immune function.
Recent research shows that microgravity affects up to 91 genes, altering signal transduction, DNA repair mechanisms, and cellular function. As researchers Vidal and Cullen noted, vertebrate survival fundamentally depends on maintaining body equilibrium within a gravitational field and orienting ourselves in our environment.
As a clinician who treats patients rather than a laboratory researcher, I approach these challenges with a focus on practical solutions. My work with vestibular disorders has revealed several promising approaches for space medicine.
For pre-flight preparation, targeted desensitization therapies can help astronauts adapt more quickly to microgravity. Properly dosed medications like meclizine can create a controlled decrease in vestibular gain, allowing us to gradually shift the central nervous system's reliance from vestibular to visual and proprioceptive inputs. This transition can be facilitated through techniques like optokinetic stimulation (using moving visual patterns) combined with joint proprioception exercises.
For astronauts returning to Earth, we would implement the reverse process—a gradual resensitization to gravity through carefully calibrated interventions. Several technologies show particular promise:
This approach uses specific wavelengths of light to stimulate cellular function, showing remarkable potential for restoring mitochondrial function and reducing oxidative damage. While weight constraints might limit its use during space missions, it offers significant benefits for pre- and post-flight treatment protocols.
Molecular hydrogen therapy represents another promising frontier for mitigating the physiological challenges of space travel. As potentially the universe's most powerful antioxidant, H₂ offers unique advantages for astronauts facing oxidative stress from radiation exposure and altered gravitational environments. Unlike conventional antioxidants that can become pro-oxidants past certain thresholds, molecular hydrogen selectively targets the most damaging free radicals while preserving beneficial reactive oxygen species necessary for cell signaling. Recent studies demonstrate that H₂ therapy reduces inflammation biomarkers, protects mitochondrial function, and maintains cellular homeostasis under stress conditions—all critical factors for long-duration space missions. The versatility of administration methods is particularly valuable in space environments; hydrogen can be delivered through gas inhalation (even at safe, low concentrations), dissolved in drinking water, or via specialized supplements, providing practical implementation options despite spacecraft constraints.
This technology enables neuroplastic remodeling by creating controlled sensory environments. In my clinical practice, we've successfully used this approach both for injury recovery and performance enhancement:
While full-body centrifuges would be ideal for simulating gravity during space flight, their size and weight make them impractical for spacecraft. However, portable alternatives show promise:
These portable neuromodulation approaches offer practical solutions for maintaining vestibular function during extended space missions, addressing the fundamental challenge of gravity's absence through targeted neurological interventions.
As we look toward longer missions and potential settlement beyond Earth, our approach to space medicine must evolve beyond treating symptoms to addressing the fundamental biological challenges of extraterrestrial environments.
Our genetic blueprint was designed for life in Earth's gravitational field. When we venture into space, we're essentially jury-rigging our biological systems to function in conditions they never evolved to handle—like running sophisticated software on incompatible hardware. This raises crucial questions about the limits of human adaptation: At what point does adjustment to zero gravity become critically problematic? Can we develop interventions that fundamentally alter how our bodies respond to gravitational absence?
The answers will emerge from continued interdisciplinary research combining insights from evolutionary biology, neurology, physiology, and aerospace medicine. By understanding how our nervous system evolved in partnership with gravity over billions of years, we can develop more effective strategies for supporting human health beyond our home planet.
The journey from Earth to other worlds represents more than a technological challenge—it's a fundamental biological frontier. Our bodies and brains were shaped by Earth's gravitational field through billions of years of evolution, creating neural systems that depend on this force for optimal function.
As we venture into space, we must recognize that we're not merely traveling to new locations; we're attempting to exist in environments fundamentally incompatible with our biological design. Yet this challenge also represents an unprecedented opportunity to deepen our understanding of human physiology and perhaps even expand the boundaries of human adaptation.
The vestibular system—ancient in its origins yet critical to our most advanced functions—serves as both our greatest vulnerability and our most promising avenue for intervention. By developing targeted approaches that address the neurological impacts of microgravity, we may eventually enable humans to thrive beyond the gravitational embrace of our home planet.
This journey connects us to our evolutionary past while propelling us toward our extraterrestrial future. From the primitive gravity-sensing mechanisms of ancient creatures to the sophisticated neuromodulation techniques of modern space medicine, we witness the continuing story of life adapting to its environment—a story that now extends beyond the world that shaped us.
About the Author: This work represents the opinions of a physician with a culmination of unconventional career paths spanning chiropractic medicine, neurology, vestibular rehabilitation, brain injury, into aerospace medicine. The author's unique interdisciplinary background provides a distinctive perspective on the challenges of human adaptation to space environments.
