- Hi, my name's Dr. Beth Healey.
I'm an emergency medicine doctor,
and a few years ago, this took me to Antarctica,
where I was working
for the European Space Agency as a researcher,
looking at the effects of isolation
on the overwintering crew.
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So people really changed throughout the mission.
You know, at the beginning, it's a lot like freshers' week.
Everyone's on best behaviors.
And you think, "How can this possibly get tough
with this group of people?
You know, we're gonna have the best overwinter ever."
But as time goes on, you know,
you really start to see people's true characters.
And I think it's not that people change in isolation,
but I think it's just a lot harder
to hide who you truly are.
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One of the things that I was really interested by
in terms of our group dynamics
was some of the crew members actually got kind of aggressive
towards other people
that spent too much of their time on Skype
or on their phone trying to contact loved ones
because they felt
that they weren't really sort of living the experience
down in Antarctica.
And I think while it is important to stay connected
to other people through Zoom, for example,
I think it's also important to spend enough time
with the group that you're isolating with
or with yourself as well
and sort of really live that moment.
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It's really easy when you're isolated
for really small things to get hugely out of proportion.
And I remember really vividly us, as a crew,
spending a whole afternoon discussing the fact
that we had actually run out of paper napkins
and what we were gonna do
to overcome the situation, you know?
I remember people saying,
"Oh, it's the end of, like, civilization as we know it."
The thing that I really remember is the fact
that I called home to one of my best friends,
and I told her what I'd been up to during the day.
And, you know, she had just been to work normally,
and it was really refreshing to have that opportunity
to speak to her and really put things into perspective.
And I was like, "Wow, you know,
how crazy that we got so upset by that."
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So about halfway through the winter,
I came to realize that one of our crew mates
had been hiding actually some chocolate
and all the nice things that we had in the roof.
So at Concordia, you never actually run out of food
because we've got a huge amount there.
But we would potentially run out of sort of the nice things.
So say for example, your Lindt Chocolate,
and what this crew member had been doing
is that they'd been rationing it out
throughout our winter period
because they were worried
that we would run out if we were just left our own devices.
'cause you could just go into the store cupboards
as you liked.
And initially, I got really upset by it
'cause I thought, "Oh, you know,
that they're just hiding all the chocolate for themselves."
But actually, the more I thought about it,
it is more about control,
and they were actually rationing out for the group,
so it wasn't that they were keeping it for themselves,
but they just really needed to feel
that control over the food that we had as a group.
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When I got back,
I suddenly realized
how overwhelming it is to go into a supermarket
and have 10 different choices of washing powder
and 20 choices of, you know, chocolate.
Whereas, actually, life in Antarctica is really simple,
and I find it a really positive thing
to actually sort of step away from my normal day-to-day life
and have that space to really think about
what it is I was doing
and just live a little bit more simply.
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So astronauts often talk about the overview effect,
and what they mean by that is the opportunity
to go up into space
and look back down through the cupola window
and really have that different perspective on Earth
and their own lives.
And although, unfortunately, you know,
we're not all going to go to space
during this current pandemic,
I think it does present an opportunity
for us all to really step back
and have that different perspective
on what it is that we're doing,
and I think that that can also be a positive thing
for all of us.
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