The Scientific Research of Artists: My Belief

I believe that creating art as an integral part of space mission activities will increase crew communication and decrease stress. I further hypothesize that creative processes will help reduce psychological problems that can strike long-duration astronauts, including insomnia, emotional hypersensitivity, irritability and depression. I believe that the experience of creating artwork—which would entail a constant shifting of the creative materials as they float within the static environments of space shuttles—can provide some of the necessary variations in perceptual experiences required for long duration flights. I further speculate that anxiety, an emotion triggered in part by a change in brain chemistry, could be alleviated to some extent by altering brain chemistry—not through pharmacological intervention, but through art. Shifting functions from the left hemisphere to the right, through the creative process, may benefit astronauts in many ways yet to be discovered.

During future experiments, quantifiable research objectives regarding these hypotheses should be developed. (I was interested in enrolling neuropsychologists to assist with scientific methodologies to address such questions as part of Project Number 33; however I was unable to do so in 1998.) Alan D. Kelly and Nick Kanas in Leisure Time Activities in Space: A Survey of Astronauts and Cosmonauts [18] discuss a test/re-test questionnaire; one such as that discussed by Kelly and Kanas could be developed to support quantitative statistics for projects similar to Research Project Number 33. Such a questionnaire could help assess the neurocognitive benefits of engaging in creative activities during flight while quantifying improvements in bi-lateral neurocognitive functioning. In the future, I hope scientists will be encouraged to work with artists to develop quantitative methods to prove artistic speculations in accordance with scientific vernacular.

“Leisure—which the Situationists thought could and should replace faith, work and family with the free creation of situations, a new use of leisure, a true leisure, a festival wherein material survival, supposedly the provenance of work, and the continuation of the species…would be natural by-products of each individual’s everyday rediscovery of his or her own life in play (what do I want to do today?).”
—Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces [19]

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