Space Neuroscience: What Is It?

Abstract

Neuroscience is a biological discipline whose goal is to describe and understand how the brain controls behavior. Behavior controlled by the brain ranges from the regulation of hormonal secretions that control body functions as varied as physiological and emotional responses to stress and the regulation of blood pressure, to simple reflexive controls, such as spinal and brainstem reflexes, which provide automatic behavioral responses to a variety of environmental stimuli. It also includes the performance of complex sensorimotor behavioral tasks, such as locomotion, posture, or the eye-hand-head coordination required to pilot an aircraft or a spacecraft, the perception of the body’s orientation in three-dimensional space, and the control of learning and memory.