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so the international space station a

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very unique environment for men and

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women to work very unique laboratory up

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uh operating in microgravity around the

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clock and can be a little stressful

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sometimes and uh we always have to be

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mindful of the crew's health to make

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sure they're operating at peak

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efficiency and there's one study that's

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been taking place over the past couple

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of years and is getting some special

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focus during the one-year mission with

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scott kelly mikhail kornenko called the

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reaction self-test and to learn a little

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bit more about it today i'm joined by dr

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david dinges who's the chief of the unit

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for the experimental psychiatry at the

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perlman school of medicine at the

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university of pennsylvania so first off

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doctor thank you so much for joining me

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today and if you could start us off what

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is it about living on the international

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space station uh that makes crews

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susceptible to things like you know

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fatigue or other stress indicators

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so thanks for having me first of all we

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wanted to document are they fatigued and

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the reaction stealth test contains a

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series of questions and a very brief

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vigilance test uh and we gathered about

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2500 responses from astronauts 24

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astronauts over six-month missions and

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there's no question they're reporting

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more fatigue and more physical fatigue

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and mental feed

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they're also the reporting higher

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workload than we see people uh rating in

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the analogs on earth so one possible

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factor could be increased workload but

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they're also showing signs of reduced

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sleep time and some of them poor sleep

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quality

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and as a result we think there's a

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combination of factors including

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potentially physical factors because

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they show increased uh responses of

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physical exhaustion

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and that's unusual given that they're in

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microgravity

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so you've gotten a lot of data they're

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showing signs of fatigue what are some

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of the effects that this increase of

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fatigue can have on these crew members

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while they're up in space

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well this is really the reason for doing

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getting this data set to understand uh

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what we sometimes refer to as behavioral

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health or neural behavioral health sort

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of brain and behavior are there changes

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uh ongoing in the space environment and

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are some of those could some of those be

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mitigated by operational interventions

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versus health interventions and uh it

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looks very much now like um one big

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finding is there's a large differential

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vulnerability meaning some astronauts

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cope much more effectively with these

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factors than others others report being

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more impacted by them more exhausted uh

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struggling more to function

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most of them can hold their performance

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up very high and this test is annoying

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to do and we had to do it at least twice

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a day so they were really challenged to

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keep doing it only takes five minutes

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but it's not terribly interesting you

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have to focus your attention it's may be

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to be hard to do uh with the demand on

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attention and in

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doing that we find that some of them can

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do that rock solid and stay right with

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it and others have much more difficulty

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and they also are the ones reporting

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more difficulty with exhaustion

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okay so walk me through a little bit so

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what is the test you said it can be a

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little bit difficult for these crew

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members how exactly are you guys

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gathering this data from all these crews

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on board the station

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well the test is all all of this and the

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q a on the test everything on it is in

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software on the support computers on the

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station so an astronaut can take open up

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any support computer and take the test

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the performance test is three minutes

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it's called the psychomotor vigilance

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test it's actually the brief version and

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it's it's actually astonishingly simple

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you simply watch the screen to the

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computer and when a light comes on you

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press the key just face bother your

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fingers on and the

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is actually a millisecond counter

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thousandths of a second going by and it

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stops and tells you how fast you were

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then it goes out and randomly comes back

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on again and you do that for three

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minutes it has it's unaffected by

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educational background and by learning

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it is well validated scientifically on

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earth to be extremely sensitive to

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fatigue level and so what we're doing is

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using this objective probe to get a

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sense of how much astronauts are

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affected by these subjective fatigue

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they're reporting the space flight

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so earlier you had mentioned that you

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had compared this to actually analogs or

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kind of situations down here on the

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ground that mimic the same environment

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what are some of the other places or

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situations that you've been collecting

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data from to compare against the

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international space station

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well we've been particularly fortunate

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first of all the test was developed on

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astronauts since they're such high

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performers we tend to develop our tests

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on amnaps on earth so nemo for example

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was a location under the ocean uh then

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we went on uh to look at astronauts in

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the high desert in

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a number of other locations but we also

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did the russian 520 day simulator

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mission and got a thousand responses out

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of those crews on this test and so we

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have a lot of data to compare we've got

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a lot of those comparisons

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okay well i mean it's it's a fascinating

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study and you're going to be getting

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some special data from these one-year

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crew members on board the international

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space station so again dr david dinges

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from the university of pennsylvania

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talking to us about the reaction

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self-test ongoing doctor thank you so

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much for joining me today really

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exciting experiment really appreciate