17.12.2022
March 25, 1968 Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin signed the layout of his new book “Psychology and Space”, created in co-authorship with Vladimir Ivanovich Lebedev, who headed the department of medical and psychological training in the CPC Air Force.
Until then Gagarin had not had many publications: a literary record of his memoirs “The Road to Space,” made by correspondents of Pravda, and two dozen articles in the periodical press. The book was to be the next step of Yuri Alekseevich in his attempt to comprehend the significance of extraterrestrial expansion, its impact on the world and the future of humanity.
It should be said that psychology is one of the most subtle aspects of astronautics. Specialists in this field do not risk publishing voluminous works intended for a wide audience. After all, astronauts in such books will inevitably appear as patients, there will be discussed deviations from the norm, adequacy, inadequacy and other unpleasant for self-esteem topics. It is better not to take the risk – not to give a reason for pranking to those who are far from scientific issues, but do not miss the opportunity to smear the heroes. Still, such literature is necessary. Even the founders of astronautics intuitively guessed that going beyond the atmosphere, to heights, from which the Earth will look like a planet, should change the spiritual essence of man. Psychology would change – it is already changing! – But in what direction? Is modern man, with his reflexes, phobias, neuroses and prejudices, ready to enter a fundamentally new environment
Psychologists looked gloomily at the prospects of space exploration from the point of view of their profession. They wrote a lot about it, almost as much as about the prolonged effects of weightlessness, although based on purely speculative considerations. Let me cite as an example the article by Fedor Dmitriyevich Anninsky “Space Psychology” (Nauka i Zhizn journal, 1961, No.2), written and published shortly before Yuri Gagarin’s flight. It sums up a kind of interim summary of research that sheds light on the psychological problems that theoretically might arise in astronauts on a real flight:
“Where to begin? Can we seriously talk about describing activities that do not yet exist? It turns out you can. The fact is that the future profession of an astronaut has a lot in common with the profession of a pilot. Both are torn from solid support area – the Earth, located in the pressurized cabin of flying projectile, rushing with great speed, exposed to the action of overloads (those external mechanical forces, which press on a man during acceleration or deceleration of the flight). Therefore, the pilot can be rightly called a ‘short-range’ astronaut, and much of what has been established with regard to his sensations may be applicable to the future conqueror of the expanses of the universe. ‘…’
In spaceflight, space and time will be perceived in the context of the rapid forward motion of the astronaut himself. However, this swiftness of motion, the enormous speed of the spacecraft, will not be felt in free flight. In terrestrial conditions, for example, the passenger of a car “sees” the speed of the car: trees, poles, pedestrians rush past the windows. Even with the eyes closed, the passenger feels the movement: the engine roars, the bumps in the road shake the body.
The free flight in the cockpit of a spaceship deprives a person of such familiar sensations of motion: the engines are silent, no shocks, there are no objects at close range behind the cockpit windows.
As one scientist figuratively put it, a person will be as if “suspended motionless in a motionless void”.
Correct orientation of a human being in space and time is an indispensable condition of his normal existence and successful activity. Orientation in space is a perception of the environment. In a familiar environment we know firmly where the bottom is, where the top is, we are able to pick up an object, kick a stone, we can freely coordinate many movements.
Undoubtedly, the state of weightlessness will make it difficult to coordinate an astronaut’s movements, ‘up’ and ‘down’ will become relative concepts. It is possible that at first the body parts will ‘refuse’ to obey. At the same time, the task will be further complicated by a drastically changed scale. It is not a question of replacing relatively small, “earthly scales” with grandiose, cosmic ones, but of acquiring a complex skill to quickly switch from one scale to another. This is especially important, for example, when returning to Earth, when the transition is made from indefinitely large scales to familiar, earthly ones. However, there is good reason to believe that all these difficulties are surmountable.
A few words about the sense of time. Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov once said that man measures time mainly by two “mechanisms”: short intervals – by ear, longer ones – with the help of the muscular sense. It is clear that both ear and muscles are only sensors that receive external signals, while the main recorder of time is in the brain. Brain biopotentials, which have a certain cyclic periodicity, are the expression of “brain metronome” work.
Lack of habitual change of day and night and terrestrial illumination are not the main reasons of difficulties in astronaut’s estimation of time according to his senses. The basis of these difficulties lies in the very fact of flight in space at enormous speed, in new, unusual conditions of reduced gravity. Hence the inability at first to correctly determine the length in time of an event. Such notions as “fast”, “slow”, “long” will shift. They may turn out to be erroneous.
It has been experimentally established that man perceives his environment in a dual way: on the one hand, our senses continuously, consistently provide us with information about everything happening around us, on the other hand, the discrete, discontinuous nature of this process is revealed. In the usual environment we do not feel this discontinuity, because the breaks turn out to be filled at the expense of the so-called trace phenomena. In addition, such interruptions in the activity of the senses do not occur simultaneously.
It is quite a different matter when enormous speeds come on the scene. Then the discontinuity of the process of perception becomes a very topical issue.
Here is a simple example. A person cannot look without blinking. This is a protective reflex, through which the eyeball is bathed in tear fluid and thus protected from drying out. Involuntary periodic blinking lasts for 13-20 hundredths of a second. The intervals between blinks vary from 2 to 10 seconds. Since blinks occur faster than the image recorded by the eye in the nerve centers of the brain disappears, continuity of vision is not compromised. Usually there is no noticeable change of visual objects during a time of two-tenths of a second. But at a very high speed of movement even for one “blink” everything may change around, the discontinuity of our perception will become evident, noticeable.
Imagine that an astronaut is distracted by fatigue or thinking, his attention is dulled – just for a moment. But that very moment could be decisive. As if a “time magnifying glass” comes into action, the moment gets a large sweep. This is where only the most precise instruments can help.
The notion of the support area as something vital is reflected in the ancient Greek myth of the invincible Antaeus. All his strength was manifested only when Antaeus was standing on the ground. The legend tells that Heracles was able to defeat Antaeus only because he managed to tear him away from his mother earth.
But will a person be able to do without a support area while in a state of weightlessness during a space flight? Changing the position of the habitual support area causes a strong reaction in animals and in unprepared people. I. Bugrimova, a famous animal tamer, says that while teaching lions to swing on swings, she observed that the animals literally fell into a stupor when the board went up. A Moscow newspaper reported that a tiger being transported on an airplane had become bald as a result of severe nervous shock. This is how the most mobile and courageous animals react to changes in the position of their footprints.
Approximately the same feeling grips a person standing at the edge of a steep cliff or on the balcony of a high-rise building. Fear, which can reach the point of terror, may arise not only if you yourself fall, but also at the sight of another fall, even at the thought of falling. A person in these cases appears as if the internal imitation of the fall: something inside as if something breaks off, captures the breath.
So gradually we came to an indirect answer to the question: to what extent does a person need the support area? Scientists, however, need exact and direct evidence that a person in weightlessness will feel well and will not lose performance.
The great Russian scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov describes such a case. In an effort to quickly develop the necessary conditioned reflex in a dog, he selected the most agile, cheerful, and intelligent animal. But, to his surprise, he was convinced that the dog did not respond due to insurmountable sleepiness. Later, it turned out that the drowsiness was due to the fact that the animal was deprived of the ability to move normally, tying him in a special machine. Similar phenomena were observed in patients who could see with one eye and hear with one ear. Such a person, having closed his healthy eye and ear, immediately fell asleep. This indicates the importance of the influx of external impressions in maintaining the normal waking state of the brain.
Wouldn’t an astronaut, deprived of habitual impressions and detached from the Earth, find himself in such a “sleepy” state? Remoteness, isolation in a cramped cabin, loneliness… How will all this affect human psyche?
Not so long ago, experiments were conducted abroad that excluded habitual irritations. They put a man in a sound- and light-tight cabin, thus turning off his vision and hearing. Special gloves were also used to weaken the tactile stimuli. In such an environment, the person’s consciousness became disturbed after several days. Sometimes hallucinations occurred. Some foreign scientists conclude from this that a similar fate awaits the astronaut.
Displacement with enormous speed, ‘detachment from the Earth’, absence of the usual support area, mediated perceptions, novelty and unexploredness of the flight route and purpose – these are the conditions that can characterize the future astronaut’s professiogram.”
It follows from the text that exotic conditions in which a cosmonaut/astronaut will find himself can provoke the most unexpected mental disorders. The author suggested that the aviation experience is applicable here, but he himself refuted it, pointing out that the astronaut will not feel the enormous speed at which he is moving, but will be in a state of sensory starvation and lack of gravity, which does not happen in aviation even during “blind” flights.
Some of the concerns of psychologists of the past related to astronautics are surprising today. For example, the author describes the problem of duality of perception, when a person is not able to see everything that surrounds him, so if the speed of human movement increases, he has time to see less and less. However, it is quite obvious that huge speeds of space flights are beyond the pilot’s perception – even when he is, like Alexey Leonov, in open space, he can perceive only relative speeds in the local area of comparable scale.
However, we are surprised only because half a century after the beginning of space flights we have at least a general idea of perception of the world from space: thanks to appropriate books and movies! Scientists in the middle of the last century could not boast such knowledge. There is no doubt that the book Psychology and Space by Yury Gagarin and Vladimir Lebedev made a great contribution to the formation of modern ideas on human reflexion in extraterrestrial conditions. By the way, it was published three times: in 1968, 1971, and 1976. This is one of the first open works devoted to the influence of the space breakthrough on people and humanity. At the same time, it is written in clear language and accessible to the layman.
In the first chapter, entitled “The Swallow That Makes Spring”, the authors talk about the Vostok spaceship and the life of its pilot (incidentally, it explicitly states that the pilot necessarily ejected from the descent vehicle before landing), but almost immediately proceeds to discuss projects for large orbital stations and interplanetary spacecraft that will one day be built. They describe how the main problems of a long stay in space are solved: the problem of supplying air and water, the problem of providing fresh food, the problem of sensory starvation, and the problem of crew survival in an emergency situation.
In the second chapter “Astronaut and robot” the authors discuss the question of interaction between man and automatics in the study of space. Here they also raise the problem of duality of perception, which we discussed above, proving that the experience of the pilot and the astronaut have little in common with each other:
“Practice has shown: it takes the pilot of a jet plane about 1.5-2 seconds to assess an ordinary situation. During this time the spacecraft, the speed of which is 8 km/sec, travels 16 kilometers. It would seem that at such a speed, and it will undoubtedly increase in the future, the astronaut will not be able to react to events in space and distinguish objects in his field of vision at all. This means that the control of interplanetary spacecraft can only be entrusted to automatons.
However, the first human spaceflight proved that this was not entirely true. This is how the surrounding world was perceived from the window of the ship during that flight:
“From a height of 300 kilometers, the illuminated surface of the Earth can be seen very well. Observing the surface of the Earth, I saw clouds and their light shadows that lay over fields, forests and seas. The water surface seemed dark, with gleaming spots. I could clearly distinguish the shores of continents, islands, large rivers, large bodies of water, and folds of terrain. As I flew over our country, I could clearly see squares of collective farm fields. Previously I had to fly up to an altitude of no more than 15,000 meters. From a satellite ship, of course, the view is worse than from an airplane, but you can still see very clearly. To tell you the truth, I was surprised that from the altitude I was at, I could see so well the details of the earth’s surface.
Although the ship was traveling at close to 28 thousand kilometers per hour, all objects on the earth’s surface seemed to float in my field of vision, limited by the window of the ship.
Why does a person see details of the Earth’s surface or even more distant stars even at space speed? It turns out that it’s all about distance. If you look from the window of a rushing train on the embankment, it is difficult to make out anything but solid merging lines. Objects that are farther away look much clearer. There are three zones – merging, flickering, and clear vision of individual objects. By the way, the boundary of the fusion and flicker zones helps an experienced pilot to determine the distance to Earth when landing.
The lower above the Earth a person flies, the harder it is for him to distinguish any objects. The higher the orbit of the satellite ship, the less a person perceives speed, and his vision becomes, as it were, better, sharper. And in interplanetary flight astronauts will have no sense of speed at all.
They will have an “excess” of time when the ship begins to move away from the planets. But, in the language of chessplayers, they will have to deal with severe time pressure during landing or encountering any celestial body, such as a meteorite. This is where automation is needed.
The authors emphasize that this interaction between man and automata is essential in any case, but if the system is not well designed, it can lead to a situation of “conflict with instruments,” when the operator or pilot begins to misinterpret the data received and make dangerous mistakes. It is noteworthy that in this section there are references to Western science fiction, in which the topic of interaction with robots was comprehensively considered.
The chapter “Staying on the Ground” describes the training facilities of the Cosmonaut Training Center in more detail than other sources, with examples of tests and trials, including curious cases where the test subjects did not always understand what was expected of them. There you can also find excerpts from secret attestations (or rather, it is today we learned that they are secret, having seen the documents as a whole), which were compiled on the first astronauts by specialists from the CPC Air Force, and provides a fragment from the personal file of Gagarin himself:
“High mobility of nervous processes contributes to the flexibility of the mind sanguine, it helps him easily switch his attention and grasp new things.
Typical sanguine were Herzen, Lermontov, Frunze, Makarov.
One of the authors of this book is attributed to a representative of this type. In the clinical-psychological characteristic drawn up before his flight, it was written:
“Yuri A. Gagarin during preparation and training for the flight showed high accuracy in performing various experimental-psychological tasks. He showed high resistance to disturbances when exposed to sudden and strong stimuli. Reactions to “novelty” (weightlessness condition, prolonged isolation in a surrogate chamber, parachute jumps and other influences) were always active: quick orientation in a new environment, ability to control oneself in various unexpected situations were noted.
When studying under conditions of isolation in the surdochamber, a highly developed ability to relax even during short pauses allotted for rest, to fall asleep quickly and to wake up independently in a given time frame was found.
One of the character traits can be noted sense of humor, tendency to good-naturedness, joke.
When training on the training spacecraft he was characterized by a calm, confident style of work with clear, concise reports after the exercise. Confidence, thoughtfulness, inquisitiveness and cheerfulness gave an individual peculiarity to the development of professional skills.”
The chapter “Interplanetary Crew” discusses the problem of psychological compatibility during long-distance flights. At that time, long flights with numerous crews had not yet been conducted, so the authors appeal to the experience of polar explorers, forced robo-zones, and explorers who set up isolation experiments. On the basis of rich material, it was concluded that fostering a “collectivist spirit” is the key to the success of any long expedition, as it allows to overcome even obvious psychological incompatibility. Methods of “upbringing” were suggested on the basis of the experience gained in forming crews for the Voskhod ships.
“Special coherence and teamwork was required from the crew of the Voskhod-2 spacecraft. Such a complicated task as an exit of a human into space from the cabin of the ship through the airlock could be accomplished only with full mutual understanding, trust and confidence in each other.
When distributing duties among the crew members, not so much professional training (both Belyaev and Leonov were highly qualified pilots) as individual psychological qualities were taken into account.
Belyaev is characterized by enormous will and self-control that allows him not to get lost in the most dangerous situations, logical thinking with profound introspection, great persistence in overcoming difficulties.
Leonov same temperament belongs to the choleric type. Strong, impetuous, he is able to develop a boiling activity, showing determination and courage. Endowed with an artistic gift, he could quickly grasp and remember the whole picture, and then fairly accurately reproduce them.
These two different characters complemented each other as if to form a highly compatible group that successfully accomplished a complex program.”
The chapter “Emotions and Space” deals with the various experiences of the astronauts, including those they experienced as fighter pilots. There is also a tragic episode, in which when you read it you involuntarily see a premonition of disaster (although, of course, this impression is false):
“But there have been occasions – though extremely rare – when a pilot has been lost and committed actions that have led to disaster. Once a plane caught fire with two other people on board besides the commander. The pilot managed to survive: he ejected in time, while the rest of the crew perished, although they also had ejection units at their disposal. During the investigation the pilot claimed that before he ejected he gave the signal to leave the plane, but according to him, he did not get a response, even though he was waiting for a few minutes. In fact, it turned out that the interval between giving the command and the pilot’s ejection was only a few seconds. And, of course, the crew members could not prepare for the ejection. The tremendous nervous tension clearly distorted the pilot’s view of time and resulted in the eventual loss of life.”
The chapters “In the World of Missing Gravity” and “Mysteries of Silence” also cover more serious aspects of the effects of space flight factors on the psyche: disorientation and kinetosis in weightlessness, spatial illusions, rearrangement of biological rhythms, information redundancy and sensory starvation. The authors give a detailed overview of ways to improve the physical and psychological stability of future astronauts, using a large number of examples to show that any of the problems can be solved by the flexible adaptability of the human body. The book “Psychology and Space” is not outdated to this day. Mankind, as in the days of Yuri Gagarin, still treads timidly in the near-Earth orbits, hesitating to move on. There are many reasons for this, but the authors of the book probably identified the main reason: it is a general disconnect, based on an inability to rise above immediate personal interests.
Nevertheless, the last paragraphs are full of optimism:
“Only strong people conquer the cosmos!
Possessing uncommon abilities and excellent physical data is extremely necessary for an astronaut. And yet this is not enough. You still need persistence in achieving goals, perseverance, selfless devotion to the chosen cause, and love for it.
Only these traits will help a physically strong and well-educated man to become a cosmonaut!
Yuri Gagarin was just such a man. We will remember him that way.
