Just a few month of lifetime in Antarctica can be nous - shrinkingly tough . scientist have latterly studied the brains of nine people ( five men and four women ) before and after they spent 14 months working at the German research station Neumayer III in Antarctica .
Reported in the journalThe New England Journal of Medicine , MRI scanstaken after their expedition showed that the nine work party members had lost a meaning amount of volume in their dentate convolution , the part of the mentality ’s hippocampus associate with spacial thinking and memory . They also detected less hoary - affair bulk in parts of the prefrontal cortex , the brain neighborhood implicate in personality , decision making , and social behavior .
The brain changes also appeared to have an core on their cognitive ability . Tests showed that the participants had reduced spacial memory and selective attention , the ability to ignore irrelevant info when focus on a undertaking .
Life in the South Pole – an environment often subjugate toperiods of 24 - time of day darkness and an unchanging snowy backdrop – is coarse for a societal animal . Not only must workers face temperatures as miserable as -50 ° C ( -58 ° F ) , but they may also experience a sense ofchronic cabin febrility . Everyday life inside the research post is qualify by monotony and protract social isolation while offering piddling in the way of privacy or stimulation .
While they did n’t specifically seek for a causal tie , the researchers believe the change in the brain they observed are the result of this environmental humdrum and draw out closing off . After all , late studieshave suggested thatsocial isolationcan have a profound upshot on both behavior and the structure of the brainiac . Whether these findings can be apply instantly to human brains is surd to say , but the new study sure suggest at a link between our social environment and our brain .
“ This scenario offers us the chance to study the ways in which vulnerability to extreme shape bear upon the human brain , ” cogitation lead Alexander Stahn , from Charité ’s Institute of Physiology and assistant prof at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania , articulate ina statement .
“ Given the small number of participants , the results of our study should be viewed with caveat , ” monish Alexander Stahn , tot : “ They do , however , provide of import information , namely – and this is fend for by initial findings in shiner – that uttermost environmental term can have an adverse effect on the Einstein and , in special , the production of raw nerve cells in the hippocampal dentate gyrus . ”
