Spaceflight doesn't just change your perspective — it shifts the actual position of your brain inside your skull, a new study reports.

Many of us know about the famed "overview effect," which describes how a trip to the final frontier changes how astronauts view the world and their place in it. But the new study focused on the physiological rather than the philosophical.

Rachel Seidler and a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took MRI scans of the brains of 26 astronauts and 24 non-astronaut participants to determine what, if any, impacts prolonged spaceflight has on one of our body's most important organs.

Their study, published on Jan. 12, showed a consistent pattern of the brain shifting backward and upward, and rotating upward, after time in microgravity, with some positional changes still detectable months after astronauts return to Earth.

Scientists have long tracked how spaceflight affects the human body, but exactly what microgravity does to the brain's anatomy remains an ongoing question. This study analyzed data from 15 astronauts who provided MRI scans before and after their missions to space, and combined that with MRI data from another 11 astronauts and two dozen participants of a long-duration, head-down tilt bed rest "microgravity analog" experiment.