Five days on the ice, and I'm going insane!

Five days into my stay at McMurdo station and I'm settling quite nicely into life in the antarctic. It goes something like this - pots, dishes, pots, dishes, pots, dishes, pots, dishes, sleep - and repeat. But I exagerate.
The community life is actually quite vibrant for a place so desolate. Surprisingly good food, bowling, film festivals, three (yes 3!) bars, our own radio station, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, running, pool, $5 six packs (and it ain't PBR), sauna, beer pong, yoga classes, dances classes, etc. And by far the most interesting aspect is the people, the wide range of personalities: world travelers, adventurers, thrill seekers, tree huggers, science lovers. I feel right at home, quite inspiring.
There is however, one common demoninator among McMurdo residents: insanity. There is an ongoing discussion about the physical effects of living at the bottom of the earth. Many residents claim that a few weeks on the ice makes you dumb. Namely, you lose your train of thought, cannot create sentences, lose your short term memory, become forgetful, lose reasoning abilities, etc. I'm not sure about the scienctific value of this claim, but I have an alternate theory. People who make the decision to come down to the ice necessarily have to be dumb, and most definitely a little insane as well. And by insane I mean; the act of forgoing logic and reason for something less concrete, something more exciting: doing intentionally stupid things: acting on a whim, a hope, or a random idea: forgetting everything you've learned: telling your mind to shut the hell up: exploring the chaotic quantum mechanics that exist in your brain below the clean theory of general relativity. For example, an insane act could be defined as travelling several thousand miles to the coldest, driest, windiest, most biologically desolate place on earth, in order to work a grueling job, for a war profiteering corporation, for the equivalent pay of 6 McDonalds double cheeseburgers per hour.
I'm not sure if Antarctica make you dumb, but I am sure that you have to be a bit insane to come here. And it is this sense insanity in McMurdo residents that I find so interesting, so inspiring, so fun.