Luckily , those consequences were
spelled out by a Norwegian-American orthodontist and researcher chasing
very dif ferent ends. Egil P . Harvold’ s hideous experiments in the 1970s and 80s would not
go over well with PET A or with anyone who has ever really cared for
animals. W orking from a lab in San Francisco, he gathered a troop of rhesus
monkeys and stuf fed silicone deep into the nasal cavities of half of them,
leaving the other half as they were. The obstructed animals couldn’ t remove
the plugs, and they couldn’ t breathe at all through their noses. They were
forced to adapt to constant mouthbreathing. Over the next six months, Harvold measured the animals’ dental arches,
the angles of their chins, the length of their faces, and more. The plugged-
up monkeys developed the same downward growth pattern, the same
narrowing of the dental arch, crooked teeth, and gaping mouth. Harvold
repeated these experiments, keeping animals obstructed for two years. They
fared even worse. Along the way , he took a lot of pictures. The photographs are heart-wrenching, not only for the sake of the poor
monkeys, but because they also of fer such a clear reflection of what
happens to our own species: after just a few months, faces grew long, slack-
jawed, and glazed over . Mouthbreathing, it turns out, changes the physical body and transforms
airways, all for the worse. Inhaling air through the mouth decreases
pressure, which causes the soft tissues in the back of the mouth to become
loose and flex inward, creating less overall space and making breathing
more dif ficult. Mouthbreathing begets more mouthbreathing. Inhaling from the nose has the opposite ef fect. It forces air against all
those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and
breathing easier . After a while, these tissues and muscles get “toned” to stayin this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal
breathing. “Whatever happens to the nose af fects what’ s happening in the mouth,
the airways, the lungs,” said Patrick McKeown during a phone interview . He’ s a bestselling Irish author and one of the world’ s leading experts on
nasal breathing. “These aren’ t separate things that operate autonomously—
it’ s one united airway ,” he told me. None of this should come as a surprise. When seasonal aller gies hit,
incidences of sleep apnea and breathing dif ficulties shoot up. The nose gets
stuf fed, we start mouthbreathing, and the airways collapse. “It’ s simple
physics,” McKeown told me. Sleeping with an open mouth exacerbates these problems. Whenever we
put our heads on a pillow , gravity pulls the soft tissues in the throat and
tongue down, closing of f the airway even more. After a while, our airways
get conditioned to this position; snoring and sleep apnea become the new
normal. •       •       •
It’ s the last night of the nasal obstruction phase of the experiment, and I am,
again, sitting up in bed and staring out the window . When a Pacific breeze blows in, which it does most nights, the shadows
of the trees and plants on the backyard wall across from my bedroom start
to move and groove in a chromatic kaleidoscope. One moment they
reor ganize into a cadre of Edward Gorey gentlemen in waistcoats, the next
into crooked Escher staircases. Another gust of wind, and these scenes
disintegrate and reform into recognizable stuf f: ferns, bamboo leaves,
bougainvillea. This is a long way of saying: I can’ t sleep. My head’ s been propped up
on pillows and I’ve been taking notes on this creepy tableau for 15, 20,
maybe 40 minutes. I unconsciously try to snif f and clear my nose, but
instead get a jolt of pain in my head. It’ s a sinus headache, and in my case,
self-inflicted. Each night for the past week and a half, I’ve felt as if I was getting
softly choked to death in my sleep and my throat was closing in on itself. Because it is, and because I am. Forced mouthbreathing was very likely
changing the shape of my airways, just as it did with Harvold’ s monkeys.The changes weren’ t happening in a matter of months, either , but days. It
was getting worse with every breath I took. My snoring has increased 4,820 percent from ten days ago. For the first
time that I’m aware of, I’m beginning to suf fer from obstructive sleep
apnea. At my worst, I’ve averaged 25 “apnea events,” meaning I was
choking so severely that my oxygen levels dropped to below 85 percent. Whenever oxygen falls below 90 percent, the blood can’ t carry enough
of it to support body tissues. If this goes on too long, it can lead to heart
failure, depression, memory problems, and early death. My snoring and
sleep apnea are still far below that of any medically diagnosed condition,
but these scores were getting worse the longer I stayed plugged up. Every morning Olsson and I would listen to recordings of ourselves
sleeping the night before. W e laughed at first, then we got a bit frightened:
what we heard weren’ t the sounds of happy Dickensian drunks, but of men
being strangled to death by our own bodies. “ More wholesome to sleep . . . with the mouth shut,” wrote Levinus
Lemnius, a Dutch physician from the 1500s who was credited as one of the
first researchers to study snoring. Even back then, Levinus knew how
injurious obstructive breathing during sleep could be. “For they that sleep
with their Jaws extended, by reason of their breath, and the air tossed to and
fro, have their tongues and palates dry , and desire to be moistened by
drinking in the night.”
This was another thing that kept happening to me. Mouthbreathing
causes the body to lose 40 percent more water . I felt this all night, every
night, waking up constantly parched and dry . Y ou’d think this moisture loss
would decrease the need to urinate, but, oddly , the opposite was true. During the deepest, most restful stages of sleep, the pituitary gland, a
pea-size ball at the base of the brain, secretes hormones that control the
release of adrenaline, endorphins, growth hormone, and other substances,
including vasopressin, which communicates with cells to store more water . This is how animals can sleep through the night without feeling thirsty or
needing to relieve themselves. But if the body has inadequate time in deep sleep, as it does when it
experiences chronic sleep apnea, vasopressin won’ t be secreted normally . The kidneys will release water , which triggers the need to urinate and
signals to our brains that we should consume more liquid. W e get thirsty ,
and we need to pee more. A lack of vasopressin explains not only my ownirritable bladder but the constant, seemingly unquenchable thirst I have
every night. There are several books that describe the horrendous health ef fects of
snoring and sleep apnea. They explain how these af flictions lead to bed-
wetting, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), diabetes, high
blood pressure, cancer , and so on. I’d read a report from the Mayo Clinic
which found that chronic insomnia, long assumed to be a psychological
problem, is often a breathing problem. The millions of Americans who have
a chronic insomnia disorder and who are, right now , like me, staring out
bedroom windows, or at TVs, phones, or ceilings, can’ t sleep because they
can’ t breathe. And contrary to what most of us might think, no amount of snoring is
normal, and no amount of sleep apnea comes without risks of serious health
ef fects. Dr . Christian Guilleminault, a sleep researcher at Stanford, found
that children who experienced no apnea events at all—only heavy breathing
and light snoring, or “ increased respiratory ef fort”—could suf fer from
mood disorders, blood pressure derangements, learning disabilities, and
more. Mouthbreathing was also making me dumber . A recent Japanese study
showed that rats who had their nostrils obstructed and were forced to
breathe through their mouths developed fewer brain cells and took twice as
long to make their way through a maze than nasal-breathing controls. Another Japanese study in humans from 2013 found that mouthbreathing
delivered a disturbance of oxygen to the prefrontal cortex, the area of the
brain associated with ADHD. Nasal breathing had no such ef fects. The ancient Chinese were onto it as well. “ The breath inhaled through
the mouth is called ‘Ni Ch’i, adverse breath,’ which is extremely harmful,”
states a passage from the T ao. “Be careful not to have the breath inhaled
through the mouth.”
As I lie in bed tossing and turning, fighting the ur ge to run to the
bathroom again, I’m trying to focus on the positive, and am reminded of a
skull from Marianna Evans’ s collection that of fered a much-needed dose of
hope. •       •       •It was morning, and Evans was seated in front of an oversize computer
monitor in the administrative of fice of her orthodontics practice, about a
half hour west of downtown Philadelphia. W ith white walls and white-tiled
floors, the place looked futuristic. It was the opposite of the tan-stucco
strip-mall blocks with ferns, goldfish tanks, and Robert Doisneau prints of
all the dental of fices I’d been to. Evans, I learned, ran a dif ferent kind of
practice. She brought up two images on a computer monitor , one of an ancient
skull from the Morton Collection, and the other of a young girl, a new
patient. I’ll call her Gigi. Gigi was about seven in the photo. Her teeth jutted
from the top of her gums, outward, inward, and in all directions. There were
dark circles under her eyes; her lips were chapped and open as if she were
sucking on an imaginary Popsicle. She suf fered from chronic snoring,
sinusitis, and asthma. She’d just started developing aller gies to foods, dust,
and pets. Gigi grew up in a wealthy household. She followed the Food Guide
Pyramid, got plenty of outdoor exercise, had her immunizations, took
vitamins D and C, and had no illnesses growing up. And yet, here she was. “I see patients like this all day ,” said Evans. “They are all the same.”
And here we are. Ninety percent of children have acquired some degree
of deformity in their mouths and noses. Forty-five percent of adults snore
occasionally , and a quarter of the population snores constantly . T wenty-five
percent of American adults over 30 choke on themselves because of sleep
apnea; and an estimated 80 percent of moderate or severe cases are
undiagnosed. Meanwhile, the majority of the population suf fers from some
form of breathing dif ficulty or resistance. W e’ve found ways to clean up our cities and to tame or kill of f so many
of the diseases that destroyed our ancestors. W e’ve become more literate,
taller , and stronger . On average, we live three times longer than people in
the Industrial Age. There are now seven and a half billion humans on the
planet—a thousand times more people than there were 10,000 years ago. And yet we’ve lost touch with our most basic and important biological
function. Evans painted a depressing picture. And the irony wasn’ t lost on me as I
sat in a sparkling clinic looking at one modern face after another and
comparing them with the ideal form and perfect teeth of Samuel Morton’ s
specimens, which he derided as “Australians and degraded Hottentots.” Atone point I scooted closer and saw my reflection in the monitor glass—that
mangle of disjointed bones, the sloping jaw , stuf fy nose, and mouth too
small to fit all its teeth. Y ou fools,  I imagined that ancient skull saying. And
for a moment, I swear , it looked like it was laughing. But Evans hadn’ t invited me to see her research just to lament the
present; her obsession with tracing the decline of human breathing is just a
starting point. She’d studied it for years, entirely at her own expense,
because she wants to help. She and her colleague, Kevin Boyd, are using
the hundreds of measurements they’ve taken from ancient skulls to build a
new model of airway health for modern humans. They are part of a
bur geoning group of pulmonauts exploring novel therapies in breathing,
lung expansion, orthodontics, and airway development. Their goal is to help
return Gigi, me, and everyone else to our more perfect, ancient forms—the
way we were before it all went haywire. On the computer screen, Evans pulled up another photo. It was Gigi
again, but in this shot there were no dark circles, none of the sallow skin or
drooping lids. Her teeth were straight and her face was broad and glowing. She was nasal breathing again and no longer snored. Her aller gies and other
respiratory problems had all but disappeared. The photograph was taken
two years after the first, and Gigi looked transformed. The same thing happened with other patients—both adults and children
—who’d regained the ability to breathe properly: their slack-jawed and
narrowed faces morphed back into a more natural configuration. They saw
their high blood pressure drop, depression abate, headaches disappear . Harvold’ s monkeys recovered, too. After two years of forced
mouthbreathing, he removed the silicone plugs. Slowly , surely , the animals
relearned how to breathe through their noses. And slowly , surely , their faces
and airways remodeled: jaws moved forward and facial structure and
airways morphed back into their wide and natural state. Six months after the experiment ended, the monkeys looked like
monkeys again, because they were breathing normally again. —
Back in my bedroom, staring out at the shadow play of branches in the
window , I’m hoping that I too can reverse whatever damage I’d done in the
last ten days, and the past four decades. I’m hoping I can relearn to breathe
the way my ancestors breathed. I suppose I’ll see soon enough.T omorrow morning, the plugs come out.Part Two
THE LOST ART AND SCIENCE OF
BREATHINGThree
NOSE
“Y ou look like shit,” says Dr . Nayak. It’ s early afternoon and I’m back at the Stanford Department of
Otolaryngology Head and Neck Sur gery Center . I’m splayed out on the
examination chair while Nayak nudges an endoscope up my right nostril. The smooth desert dunes I journeyed through ten days ago look like they’ve
been hit by a hurricane. I’ll skip the details; let’ s just say my nasal cavity is
a mess. “Now your favorite part,” says Nayak, chuckling. Before I sneeze or can
consider running away , he grabs the wire brush and pushes it a few inches
into my head. “It’ s pretty soupy in there,” he says, sounding somewhat
pleased. He repeats with the left nostril, places the gunk-covered RNA
brushes into a test tube, then scoots me out of the way . For the past week and a half I’d been waiting for this moment. I’d
anticipated removing these plugs and tape and cotton to be a celebratory
scene involving high-fives and nasal sighs of relief. I could breathe like a
healthy human again! In reality , it’ s minutes of discomfort followed by more obstruction. My
nose is such a mess that Nayak has to grab a pair of pliers and insert several
inches of cotton swabs into each nostril to keep whatever is up there from
spilling onto the floor . Then it’ s back to the pulmonary function tests, an X-
ray , the phlebotomist, and the rhinologist, repeating all the tests Olsson and
I took before the obstruction phase. The results will be ready in a few
weeks. —It’ s not until I get home that evening and rinse my sinuses several times that
I can take a first full breath through my nose. I grab a coat and walk
barefoot to the backyard. There are wispy plumes of cirrus clouds moving
across the night sky , as big as spaceships. Above them, a few stubborn stars
punch through the mist and cluster around a waxing moon. I exhale stale air from my chest and take in a breath. I smell the sour ,
old-sock stink of mud. The black-label ChapStick of the damp doormat. A
L ysol whif f of the lemon tree and the anise tinge of dying leaves. Each of these scents, this material in the world, explodes in my head in a
T echnicolor burst. The scents are so sparkled and alarming that I can almost
see them—a billion colored dots in a Seurat painting. As I take in another
breath, I imagine all these molecules passing down my throat and into my
lungs, pushing deeper into my bloodstream, where they provide fuel for
thoughts and the sensations that made them. Smell is life’ s oldest sense. Standing here alone, nostrils flaring, it
occurs to me that breathing is so much more than just getting air into our
bodies. It’ s the most intimate connection to our surroundings. Everything you or I or any other breathing thing has ever put in its
mouth, or in its nose, or soaked in through its skin, is hand-me-down space
dust that’ s been around for 13.8 billion years. This wayward matter has
been split apart by sunlight, spread throughout the universe, and come back
together again. T o breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to
take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves back
out. Respiration is, at its core, reciprocation. Respiration, I’m hoping, can also lead to restoration. Starting today , I
will attempt to heal whatever damage has been done to my body over the
past ten days of mouthbreathing and try to ensure ongoing health in the
future. I’ll put into practice several thousand years of teachings from
several dozen pulmonauts, breaking down their methods and measuring the
ef fects. W orking with Olsson, I’ll explore techniques to expand the lungs,
develop the diaphragm, flood the body with oxygen, hack the autonomic
nervous system, stimulate immune response, and reset chemoreceptors in
the brain. The first step is the recovery phase I’ve just done. T o breathe through
my nose, all day and all night. The nose is crucial because it clears air , heats it, and moistens it for
easier absorption. Most of us know this. But what so many people neverconsider is the nose’ s unexpected role in problems like erectile dysfunction. Or how it can trigger a cavalcade of hormones and chemicals that lower
blood pressure and ease digestion. How it responds to the stages of a
woman’ s menstrual cycle. How it regulates our heart rate, opens the vessels
in our toes, and stores memories. How the density of your nasal hairs helps
determine whether you’ll suf fer from asthma. Few of us ever consider how the nostrils of every living person pulse to
their own rhythm, opening and closing like a flower in response to our
moods, mental states, and perhaps even the sun and the moon. •       •       •
Thirteen hundred years ago, an ancient T antric text, the Shiva Swar odaya ,
described how one nostril will open to let breath in as the other will softly
close throughout the day . Some days, the right nostril yawns awake to greet
the sun; other days, the left awakens to the fullness of the moon. According
to the text, these rhythms are the same throughout every month and they’re
shared by all humanity . It’ s a method our bodies use to stay balanced and
grounded to the rhythms of the cosmos, and each other . In 2004, an Indian sur geon named Dr . Ananda Balayogi Bhavanani
attempted to scientifically test the Shiva Swar odaya  patterns on an
international group of subjects. Over the course of a month, he found that
when the influence of the sun and moon on the Earth was at its strongest—
during a full or new moon—the students consistently shared the Shiva
Swar odaya  pattern. Bhavanani admitted the data were anecdotal and much more research
would be needed to prove that all humans shared in this pattern. Still,
scientists have known for more than a century that the nostrils do  pulse to
their own beat, that they do open and close like flowers throughout the day
and night. The phenomenon, called nasal cycles, was first described in 1895 by a
German physician named Richard Kayser . He noticed that the tissue lining
one nostril of his patients seemed to quickly congest and close while the
other would mysteriously open. Then, after about 30 minutes to 4 hours, the
nostrils switched, or “cycled.” The shifting appeared to be influenced less
by the moon’ s mysterious pull and more by sexual ur ges.The interior of the nose, it turned out, is blanketed with erectile tissue,
the same flesh that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples. Noses get
erections. W ithin seconds, they too can engor ge with blood and become
lar ge and stif f. This happens because the nose is more intimately connected
to the genitals than any other or gan; when one gets aroused, the other
responds. The mere thought of sex for some people causes such severe
bouts of nasal erections that they’ll have trouble breathing and will start to
sneeze uncontrollably , an inconvenient condition called “ honeymoon
rhinitis.” As sexual stimulation weakens and erectile tissue becomes flaccid,
the nose will, too. After Kayser ’ s discovery , decades passed and nobody of fered a good
reason for why the human nose was lined with erectile tissue, or why the
nostrils cycled. There were many theories: some believed this switching
provoked the body to flip over from side to side while sleeping to prevent
bedsores. (Breathing is easier through the nostril opposite the pillow .) Others thought the cycling helped protect the nose from respiratory
infection and aller gies, while still others ar gued that alternate airflow allows
us to smell odors more ef ficiently . What researchers eventually managed to confirm was that nasal erectile
tissue mirrored states of health. It would become inflamed during sickness
or other states of imbalance. If the nose became infected, the nasal cycle
became more pronounced and switched back and forth quickly . The right
and left nasal cavities also worked like an HV AC system, controlling
temperature and blood pressure and feeding the brain chemicals to alter our
moods, emotions, and sleep states. The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through
this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter , and cortisol
levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because
breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic
nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a
more elevated state of alertness and readiness. Breathing through the right
nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain,
specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical
decisions, language, and computing. Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite ef fect: it works as a
kind of brake system to the right nostril’ s accelerator . The left nostril is
more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers temperature and blood pressure, cools the body ,
and reduces anxiety . Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite
side of the prefrontal cortex, the right area that plays a role in creative
thought, emotions, formation of mental abstractions, and negative emotions. In 2015, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, recorded
the breathing patterns of a schizophrenic woman over the course of three
consecutive years and found that she had a “significantly greater” left-
nostril dominance. This breathing habit, they hypothesized, was likely
overstimulating the right-side “creative part” of her brain, and as a result
prodding her imagination to run amok. Over several sessions, the
researchers taught her to breathe through her opposite, “logical” nostril, and
she experienced far fewer hallucinations. Our bodies operate most ef ficiently in a state of balance, pivoting
between action and relaxation, daydreaming and reasoned thought. This
balance is influenced by the nasal cycle, and may even be controlled by it. It’ s a balance that can also be gamed. There’ s a yoga practice dedicated to manipulating the body’ s functions
with forced breathing through the nostrils. It’ s called nadi shodhana —in
Sanskrit, nadi  means “channel” and shodhana  means “purification”—or ,
more commonly , alternate nostril breathing. —
I’ve been conducting an informal study of alternate nostril breathing for the
past several minutes. It’ s the second day of the nasal breathing “Recovery” phase, and I’m
sitting in my living room, my elbows on the cluttered dining room table,
softly sucking air through my right nostril, pausing for five seconds, and
then blowing it out. There are dozens of alternate nostril breathing techniques. I’ve started
with the most basic. It involves placing an index finger over the left nostril
and then inhaling and exhaling only through the right. I did this two dozen
times after each meal today , to heat up my body and aid my digestion. Before meals, and any other time I wanted to relax, I’d switch sides,
repeating the same exercise with my left nostril open. T o gain focus and
balance the body and mind, I followed a technique called surya bheda
pranayama , which involves taking one breath into the right nostril, then
exhaling through the left for several rounds.These exercises felt great. Sitting here after a few rounds, I sense an
immediate and potent clarity and relaxation, even a floatiness. As
advertised, I’ve been entirely free of any gastroesophageal reflux. I haven’ t
registered the slightest stomach ache. Alternate nostril breathing appeared
to have delivered these benefits, but these techniques, I’d found, were
usually fleeting, lasting only 30 minutes or so. The real transformation in my body over the last 24 hours came from
another practice: letting my nasal erectile tissues flex of their own accord,
naturally adjusting the flow of air to suit the needs of my body and brain. It
happened because of simply breathing through my nose. As I’m quietly contemplating all this, Olsson comes bar ging in. “Good
afternoon!” he yells. He’ s wearing his shorts and Abercrombie sweatshirt,
and he plops down across from me while placing a blood-pressure cuf f
around his right arm. This is the same position he’ s assumed for the last
eleven days straight, in pretty much the same clothes. T oday , however ,
there’ s no bandage, nose clip, or silicone plugs up his nose. He’ s also
breathing freely through his nostrils, taking in easy and silent inhales and
exhales. His face is flushed, he’ s sitting upright, and he’ s so keyed up with
ener gy that he can’ t stay still. I figured that some of our new , bright outlook on life was psychosomatic
until a few minutes later , when we checked our measurements. My systolic
blood pressure had dropped from 142 ten days ago—a deep state of stage 2
hypertension—to 124, still a bit high but just a few points from a healthy
range. My heart rate variability increased by more than 150 percent, and my
carbon dioxide levels rose around 30 percent, taking me from a state of
hypocapnia, which can cause dizziness, numbness in the fingers, and mental
confusion, and placing me squarely within the medically normal zone. Olsson showed similar improvements. And there’ s potential for much more. Because pulsing nasal cycles are
only a small part of the nose’ s vital functions. Imagine for a moment that you’re holding a billiard ball at eye level a
few inches from your face. Then imagine slowly pushing that entire ball
inside the center of your face. The volume the ball would take up, some six
cubic inches, is equivalent to the total space of all the cavities and
passageways that make up the interior of the adult nose. In a single breath, more molecules of air will pass through your nose
than all the grains of sand on all the world’ s beaches—trillions and trillionsof them. These little bits of air come from a few feet or several yards away . As they make their way toward you, they’ll twist and spool like the stars in
a van Gogh sky , and they’ll keep twisting and spooling and scrolling as they
pass into you, traveling at a clip of about five miles per hour . What directs this rambling path are turbinates, six maze-like bones
(three on each side) that begin at the opening of your nostrils and end just
below your eyes. The turbinates are coiled in such a way that if you split
them apart, they’d look like a seashell, which is how they got their other
name, nasal concha , after the conch shell. Crustaceans use their elaborately
designed shells to filter impurities and keep invaders out. So do we. The lower turbinates at the opening of the nostrils are covered in that
pulsing erectile tissue, itself covered in mucous membrane, a nappy sheen
of cells that moistens and warms breath to your body temperature while
simultaneously filtering out particles and pollutants. All these invaders
could cause infection and irritation if they got into the lungs; the mucus is
the body’ s “ first line of defense.” It’ s constantly on the move, sweeping
along at a rate of about half an inch every minute, more than 60 feet per
day . Like a giant conveyor belt, it collects inhaled debris in the nose, then
moves all the junk down the throat and into the stomach, where it’ s
sterilized by stomach acid, delivered to the intestines, and sent out of your
body . This conveyor belt doesn’ t just move by itself. It’ s pushed along by
millions of tiny , hair -like structures called cilia. Like a field of wheat in the
wind, cilia sway with each inhale and exhale, but do so at a fast clip of up to
16 beats per second. Cilia closer to the nostrils gyrate at a dif ferent rhythm
than those farther along, their movements creating a coordinated wave that
keeps mucus moving deeper . The cilia grip is so strong that it can even push
against the force of gravity . No matter what position the nose (and head) is
in, whether it’ s upside down or right-side up, the cilia will keep pushing
inward and down. W orking together , the dif ferent areas of the turbinates will heat, clean,
slow , and pressurize air so that the lungs can extract more oxygen with each
breath. This is why nasal breathing is far more healthy and ef ficient than
breathing through the mouth. As Nayak explained when I first met him, the
nose is the silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our
minds, and weather vane to our emotions.•       •       •
The magic of the nose, and its healing powers, wasn’ t lost on the ancients. Around 1500 BCE , the Ebers Papyrus, one of the oldest medical texts
ever discovered, of fered a description of how nostrils were supposed to feed
air to the heart and lungs, not the mouth. A thousand years later , Genesis
2:7 described how “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul.” A Chinese T aoist text from the eighth century AD  noted that the nose
was the “heavenly door ,” and that breath must be taken in through it. “Never do otherwise,” the text warned, “for breath would be in danger and
illness would set in.”
But it wasn’ t until the nineteenth century that the W estern population
ever considered the glories of nasal breathing. It happened thanks to an
adventurous artist and researcher named Geor ge Catlin. By 1830, Catlin had left what he called a “dry and tedious” job as a
lawyer to become a portrait painter for Philadelphia’ s high society . He
became well-known for his depictions of governors and aristocrats, but all
the pomp and pretention of polite society did not impress him. Although his
health was failing, Catlin yearned to be far away in nature, to capture rawer
and more real depictions of humanity . He packed a gun, several canvases, a
few paintbrushes, and headed west. Catlin would spend the next six years
traveling thousands of miles throughout the Great Plains, covering more
distance than Lewis and Clark to document the lives of 50 Native American
tribes. He went up the Missouri to live with the Lakota Sioux. He met with the
Pawnee, Omaha, Cheyenne, and Blackfeet. Along the banks of the Upper
Missouri, he happened upon the civilization of the Mandan, a mysterious
tribe whose members stood six feet tall and lived in bubble-shaped houses. Many had luminous blue eyes and snow-white hair . Catlin realized that nobody really knew about the Mandan, or other
Plains tribes, because no one of European descent had bothered to spend
time talking to them, researching them, living with them, and learning about
their beliefs and traditions. “ I am traveling this country , as I have before said, not to advance or to
prove theories , but to see all I am able to see and to tell it in the simplest
and most intelligible manner I can to the world, for their own conclusions,”Catlin wrote. He would paint some 600 portraits and take hundreds of pages
of notes, forming what famed author Peter Matthiessen would call “ the first,
last, and only complete record ever made of the Plains Indians at the height
of their splendid culture.”
The tribes varied region by region, with dif ferent customs, traditions,
and diets. Some, like the Mandan, ate only buf falo flesh and maize, while
others lived on venison and water , and still others harvested plants and
flowers. The tribes looked dif ferent, too, with varying hair colors, facial
features, and skin tones. And yet Catlin marveled at the fact that all 50 tribes seemed to share the
same superhuman physical characteristics. In some groups, such as the
Crow and the Osage, Catlin wrote there were few men, “at their full growth,
who are less than six feet in stature, and very many of them six and a half,
and others seven feet.” They all seemed to share a Herculean make of broad
shoulders and barrel chests. The women were nearly as tall and just as
striking. Having never seen a dentist or doctor , the tribal people had teeth that
were perfectly straight—“as regular as the keys of a piano,” Catlin noted. Nobody seemed to get sick, and deformities and other chronic health
problems appeared rare or nonexistent. The tribes attributed their vigorous
health to a medicine, what Catlin called the “great secret of life.” The secret
was breathing. The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through
the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress
and disease. On the other hand, breath inhaled through the nose kept the
body strong, made the face beautiful, and prevented disease. “The air which
enters the lungs is as dif ferent from that which enters the nostrils as distilled
water is dif ferent from the water in an ordinary cistern or a frog-pond,” he
wrote. Healthy nasal breathing started at birth. Mothers in all these tribes
followed the same practices, carefully closing the baby’ s lips with their
fingers after each feeding. At night, they’d stand over sleeping infants and
gently pinch mouths shut if they opened. Some Plains tribes strapped
infants to a straight board and placed a pillow beneath their heads, creating
a posture that made it much harder to breathe through the mouth. During
winter , infants would be wrapped in light clothing and then held at arm’ slength on warmer days so they’d be less prone to get too hot and begin
panting. All these methods trained children to breathe through their noses, all
day , every day . It was a habit they would carry with them the rest of their
lives. Catlin described how adult tribal members would even resist smiling
with an open mouth, fearing some noxious air might get in. This practice
was as “old and unchangeable as their hills,” he wrote, and it was shared
universally throughout the tribes for millennia. —
T wenty years after Catlin explored the W est, he set of f again, at age 56, to
live with indigenous cultures in the Andes, Ar gentina, and Brazil. He
wanted to know if “medicinal” breathing practices extended beyond the
Plains. They did. Every tribe Catlin visited over the next several years—
dozens of them—shared the same breathing habits. It was no coincidence,
he reported, that they also shared the same vigorous health, perfect teeth,
and forward-growing facial structure. He wrote about his experiences in
The Br eath of Life , published in 1862. The book was devoted solely to
documenting the wonders of nasal breathing and the hazards of
mouthbreathing. Catlin was not only a chronicler of breathing methods; he was a
practitioner . Nasal breathing saved his life. As a boy , Catlin snored and was wracked with one respiratory problem
after another . By the time he reached his 30s and first went out W est, these
problems had become so severe that he’d sometimes spit up blood. His
friends were convinced he had lung disease. Every night Catlin feared he
would die. “I became fully convinced of the danger of the habit [mouthbreathing],
and resolved to overcome it,” he wrote. Through “sternness of resolution
and perseverance,” Catlin forced his mouth closed while he slept and
always breathed through his nose during waking hours. Soon, there were no
more aches, pains, or bleeding. By his mid-30s, Catlin reported feeling
healthier and stronger than at any other time in his life. “I at length
completely conquered an insidious enemy that was nightly attacking me in
my helpless position, and evidently fast hurrying me to the grave,” he
wrote.Geor ge Catlin would live to be 76, about double the average life
expectancy at the time. He credited his longevity to the “great secret of
life”: to always  breathe through the nose. •       •       •
It’ s the third night of the nasal breathing phase of the experiment, and I’m
sitting up in bed reading, taking slow and easy breaths through my nose. I’m not breathing this way out of some “constant adult conviction,” as
Catlin wrote. I’m doing it because my lips are taped shut. Catlin suggested tying a bandage around the jaw at night, but that
sounded dangerous and dif ficult, so I opted for another technique, which I’d
heard about months earlier from a dentist who runs a private practice in
Silicon V alley . Dr . Mark Burhenne had been studying the links between
mouthbreathing and sleep for decades, and had written a book on the
subject. He told me that mouthbreathing contributed to periodontal disease
and bad breath, and was the number one cause of cavities, even more
damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene. (This belief
had been echoed by other dentists for a hundred years, and was endorsed by
Catlin too.) Burhenne also found that mouthbreathing was both a cause of
and a contributor to snoring and sleep apnea. He recommended his patients
tape their mouths shut at night. “The health benefits of nose breathing are undeniable,” he told me. One
of the many benefits is that the sinuses release a huge boost of nitric oxide,
a molecule that plays an essential role in increasing circulation and
delivering oxygen into cells. Immune function, weight, circulation, mood,
and sexual function can all be heavily influenced by the amount of nitric
oxide in the body . (The popular erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil, known
by the commercial name V iagra, works by releasing nitric oxide into the
bloodstream, which opens the capillaries in the genitals and elsewhere.) Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the
reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than by just breathing
through the mouth. Mouth taping, Burhenne said, helped a five-year -old
patient of his overcome ADHD, a condition directly attributed to breathing
dif ficulties during sleep. It helped Burhenne and his wife cure their ownsnoring and breathing problems. Hundreds of other patients reported similar
benefits. The whole thing seemed a little sketchy until Ann Kearney , a doctor of
speech-language pathology at the Stanford V oice and Swallowing Center ,
told me the same. Kearney helped rehabilitate patients who had swallowing
and breathing disorders. She swore by mouth taping. Kearney herself had spent years as a mouthbreather due to chronic
congestion. She visited an ear , nose, and throat specialist and discovered
that her nasal cavities were blocked with tissue. The specialist advised that
the only way to open her nose was through sur gery or medications. She
tried mouth taping instead. “The first night, I lasted five minutes before I ripped it of f,” she told me. On the second night, she was able to tolerate the tape for ten minutes. A
couple of days later , she slept through the night. W ithin six weeks, her nose
opened up. “It’ s a classic example of use it or lose it,” Kearney said. T o prove her
claim, she examined the noses of 50 patients who had under gone
laryngectomies, a procedure in which a breathing hole is cut into the throat. W ithin two months to two years, every patient was suf fering from complete
nasal obstruction. Like other parts of the body , the nasal cavity responds to whatever
inputs it receives. When the nose is denied regular use, it will atrophy . This
is what happened to Kearney and many of her patients, and to so much of
the general population. Snoring and sleep apnea often follow . Keeping the nose constantly in use, however , trains the tissues inside the
nasal cavity and throat to flex and stay open. Kearney , Burhenne, and so
many of their patients healed themselves this way: by breathing from their
noses, all day and all night. How to apply mouth tape, or “sleep tape” as it’ s also called, is a matter
of personal preference, and everyone I talked to had their own technique. Burhenne liked to place a small piece horizontally over the lips; Kearney
preferred a fat strip over the entire mouth. The internet was filled with
suggestions. One guy used eight pieces of inch-wide tape to create a sort of
tape goatee. Another used duct tape. A woman suggested taping the entire
lower half of the face. T o me, these methods are ridiculous and excessive. Looking for an
easier way , over the last few days I conducted my own experiments withblue painter ’ s tape, which smelled weird, and Scotch tape, which crinkled. Band-Aids were too sticky . Eventually I realized that all I or anyone really needed was a postage-
stamp-size piece of tape at the center of the lips—a Charlie Chaplin
mustache moved down an inch. That’ s it. This approach felt less
claustrophobic and allowed a little space on the sides of the mouth if I
needed to cough or talk. After much trial and error , I settled on 3M Nexcare
Durapore “durable cloth” tape, an all-purpose sur gical tape with a gentle
adhesive. It was comfortable, had no chemical scent, and didn’ t leave
residue. In the three nights since I started using this tape, I went from snoring
four hours to only ten minutes. I’d been warned by Burhenne that sleep tape
won’ t do anything to help treat sleep apnea. My experience suggested
otherwise. As my snoring disappeared, so did apnea. I’d suf fered up to two dozen apnea events in the mouthbreathing phase,
but last night had zero. I suf fered no creepy insomniac hallucinations, no
late-night ruminations on Homo habilis  or Edward Gorey . I never woke up
needing to pee. I didn’ t have to, because my pituitary gland was likely
releasing vasopressin. I was finally sleeping soundly . Meanwhile, Olsson went from snoring half the night to not snoring for
even a minute. His apnea events dropped from 53 to zero. The bright-eyed,
cotton-haired Swede I’d felt so guilty about abusing had been reborn. Earlier today he was smiling, so convinced of sleep tape’ s healing power
that he kept a piece of it stuck to his lips for the rest of the morning. Sleep, and life, had become something that Olsson and I embraced
again. Now , sitting in bed, with a little stamp of white tape stuck to my lips,
I flipped to the last page in Catlin’ s Br eath of Life , the final paragraph he’d
ever publish in his long life of research. “And if I were to endeavor to bequeath to posterity the most important
Motto which human language can convey , it should be in three words—
SHUT -YOUR-MOUTH. . . . Where I would paint and engrave it, in every
Nursery , and on every Bed-post  in the Universe, its meaning could not be
mistaken. “And if obeyed,” he continued, “its importance would soon be realized.”Four
EXHALE
Every morning at 9:00, after Olsson and I have finished our testing and split
of f for solo time, I roll out a mat on my living room floor and work on
becoming a little more immortal. The path to everlasting life involves a lot of stretching: back bends, neck
bends, and twirling, each one a holy and ancient practice that had been
passed down in secrecy from one Buddhist monk to another for 2,500 years. Olsson and I need this stretching; even if we breathe through the nose
twenty-four hours a day , it won’ t help much unless we’ve got the lung
capacity to hold in that air . Just a few minutes of daily bending and
breathing can expand lung capacity . W ith that extra capacity we can expand
our lives. The stretches, called the Five T ibetan Rites, came to the W estern world,
and to me, by way of writer Peter Kelder , who was known as a lover of
“books and libraries, words and poetry .”
In the 1930s, Kelder was sitting on a park bench in southern California
when an elderly stranger struck up a conversation. The man, whom he
called Colonel Bradford, had spent decades in India with the British Army . The Colonel was old—all sloping shoulders, gray hair , and wobbly legs—
but he believed there was a cure for aging and that it was locked up in a
monastery in the Himalayas. The usual mystical stuf f occurred up there: the
sick became healthy , poor became rich, old became young. Kelder and the
Colonel stayed in touch and shared many conversations. Then, one day , the
old man hobbled away , desperate to find this Shangri-La before he drew his
last breath.Four years passed until Kelder received a call from his building’ s
doorman. The Colonel was waiting downstairs. He looked 20 years
younger . He was standing straight, his face vibrant and alive, and his once-
balding head was covered in thick, dark hair . He’d found the monastery ,
studied the ancient manuscripts, and learned restorative practices from the
monks. He’d reversed aging through nothing more than stretching and
breathing. Kelder described these techniques in a slim booklet titled The Eye of
Revelation,  published in 1939 . Few people bothered to read it; fewer
believed it. Kelder ’ s yarn was likely fabricated, or at minimum grossly
exaggerated. However , the lung-expanding stretches he described are rooted
in actual exercises that date back to 500 BCE . T ibetans had used these
methods for millennia to improve physical fitness, mental health,
cardiovascular function, and, of course, extend life. —
More recently , science has begun measuring what the ancient T ibetans
understood intuitively . In the 1980s, researchers with the Framingham
Study , a 70-year longitudinal research program focused on heart disease,
attempted to find out if lung size really did correlate to longevity . They
gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers,
and discovered that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’ t genetics, diet,
or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung
capacity . The smaller and less ef ficient lungs became, the quicker subjects got
sick and died. The cause of deterioration didn’ t matter . Smaller meant
shorter . But lar ger lungs equaled longer lives. Our ability to breathe full breaths was, according to the researchers,
“literally a measure of living capacity .” In 2000, University of Buf falo
researchers ran a similar study , comparing lung capacity in a group of more
than a thousand subjects over three decades. The results were the same. What neither of these landmark studies addressed, however , was how a
person with deteriorated lungs might heal and strengthen them. There were
sur geries to remove diseased tissue and drugs to stem infections, but no
advice on how to keep lungs lar ge and healthy throughout life. All the way
up to the 1980s, the common belief in W estern medicine was that the lungs,
like every other internal or gan, were immutable. That is, whatever lungs wewere born with, we were stuck with. As these or gans degraded with age, the
only thing we could do was sigh and bear it. Aging was supposed to go like this: Starting around 30, we should
expect to lose a little more memory , mobility , and muscle with every
passing year . W e would also lose the ability to breathe properly . Bones in
the chest would become thinner and change shape, causing rib cages to
collapse inward. Muscle fibers surrounding the lungs would weaken and
prevent air from entering and exiting. All these things reduce lung capacity . The lungs themselves will lose about 12 percent of capacity from the
age of 30 to 50, and will continue declining even faster as we get older , with
women faring worse than men. If we make it to 80, we’ll be able to take in
30 percent less air than we did in our 20s. W e’re forced to breathe faster and
harder . This breathing habit leads to chronic problems like high blood
pressure, immune disorders, and anxiety . But what the T ibetans have long known and what W estern science is
now discovering is that aging doesn’ t have to be a one-way path of decline. The internal or gans are malleable, and we can change them at nearly any
time. Freedivers know this better than anyone. I’d learned it from them years
ago, when I met several people who had increased their lung capacity by an
astounding 30 to 40 percent. Herbert Nitsch, a multiple world record holder ,
reportedly has a lung capacity of 14 liters—more than double  that of the
average male. Neither Nitsch nor any of the other freedivers started out like
this; they made their lungs lar ger by force of will. They taught themselves
how to breathe in ways that dramatically changed the internal or gans of
their bodies. Fortunately , diving down hundreds of feet is not required. Any regular
practice that stretches the lungs and keeps them flexible can retain or
increase lung capacity . Moderate exercise like walking or cycling has been
shown to boost lung size by up to 15 percent. —
These discoveries would have been welcome news to Katharina Schroth, a
teenager who lived in Dresden, Germany , in the early 1900s. Schroth had
been diagnosed with scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine. The
condition had no cure, and most children who suf fered from extreme caseslike Schroth’ s could expect to spend a life in bed or rolling around in a
wheelchair . Schroth had other thoughts about the human body’ s potential. She’d
watched how balloons collapsed or expanded, pushing or pulling in
whatever was around them. The lungs, she felt, were no dif ferent. If she
could expand her lungs, maybe she could also expand her skeletal structure. Maybe she could straighten her spine and improve the quality and quantity
of her life. At age 16, Schroth began training herself in something called
“orthopedic breathing.” She would stand in front of a mirror , twist her body ,
and inhale into one lung while limiting air intake to the other . Then she’d
hobble over to a table, sling her body on its side, and arch her chest back
and forth to loosen her rib cage while breathing into the empty space. Schroth spent five years doing this. At the end, she’d ef fectively cured
herself of “incurable” scoliosis; she’d breathed her spine straight again. Schroth began teaching the power of breathing to other scoliosis
patients, and by the 1940s she was running a bustling institute in rural
western Germany . It had no hospital rooms or other standard medical
equipment; just a few run-down buildings, a yard, a picket fence, and patio
tables. One hundred fifty scoliosis patients would gather there at a time. They suf fered from the most severe form of the disease, with spines curved
more than 80 degrees. Many were so hunched over , their backs so twisted
and turned, that they couldn’ t walk or even look upward. Their disfigured
ribs and chests made it hard for them to take a breath, and they likely
suf fered from respiratory problems, fatigue, and heart conditions because of
it. Hospitals had given up on trying to heal these patients. They came to live
with Schroth for six weeks. The German medical community derided Schroth, claiming that she was
neither a professional trainer nor a physician and was not qualified to treat
patients. She ignored them all; she kept doing things her way , having the
women strip down bare-chested in a dirt lot beneath a copse of beech trees,
stretching and breathing themselves back to health. W ithin a few weeks,
hunched backs straightened and many students gained inches in height. W omen who had been bedridden and hopeless finally began to walk again. They could take full breaths again. Schroth spent the next 60 years bringing her techniques to hospitals
throughout Germany and beyond. T oward the end of her life, the medicalcommunity had changed its tune and the German government awarded
Schroth the Federal Cross of Merit for her contributions to medicine. “What the bodily form depends on is breath (chi) and what breath relies
upon is form,” states a Chinese adage from 700 AD . “When the breath is
perfect, the form is perfect (too).”
Schroth continued to expand her lungs and improve her own breathing
and form throughout her life. This former scoliosis patient, who as a
teenager had been left to wither in bed, would die in 1985, just three days
shy of her 91st birthday . •       •       •
Midway through my research for this book, I took a trip to New Y ork City
to meet a more contemporary breathing expert who of fered a dif ferent
approach to expanding the lungs and longevity . Her apartment workspace
was located a few blocks from the United Nations in a brown brick building
with an awning covered in pink-eyed pigeons. I walked past a drowsy
doorman, rode up an elevator , and a minute later I was knocking at room
418. L ynn Martin welcomed me in. She was beanpole thin and dressed in a
black jumpsuit with an oversize brass-buckled belt. “I told you it was
small!” she said of the studio apartment. Surrounding us were manila
folders, human anatomy books, and a few plastic models of human lungs. On a wall beside a bookshelf were black-and-white photos of Martin in the
early 1970s. In one, she was wearing a black leotard in mid-glide on the
wood floor of a dance studio, her blond hair pulled back in a lazy ponytail,
her face bearing an uncanny resemblance to Rosemary’ s Baby –era Mia
Farrow . After a few pleasantries, Martin sat me down and started telling me what
I came to hear . “He was very verbal, but when you asked what exactly he
was doing, he could never explain it,” she said. “Nobody since has ever
been able to do what he did.”
The subject of intrigue was Carl Stough, a choir conductor and medical
anomaly who got his start in the 1940s. Of all the pulmonauts I’d come
across over the past several years, Stough was the most elusive. He
published one book in 1970, which quickly flopped and went out of print. T wenty years later , a CBS producer put together a one-hour program abouthis groundbreaking work, but it never aired. Stough himself didn’ t advertise
his techniques. He never went on speaking tours. Even so, professional
opera singers, Grammy-winning saxophonists, paraplegics, and dying
emphysemics—thousands of them—managed to find him. Stough broke all
the rules; he expanded lungs and extended life spans. And yet, most people
today have never heard of him. Martin had worked with Stough for more than two decades. She was a
living link to this mysterious man and his research in the lost art of
breathing. What Stough had discovered, and what Martin had learned, was
that the most important aspect of breathing wasn’ t just to take in air through
the nose. Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion,
and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. It was
in the transformative power of a full exhalation. —
Photographs of Stough from the 1940s show an upright man who bore a
passing resemblance to Thurston Howell III, the millionaire from Gilligan’ s
Island . Stough liked to sing and teach singing. He noticed how his fellow
singers would belt out a few measures, stop to take a breath, and then belt
out a few more. Each seemed to be gasping for air , holding it high in the
chest, and releasing it too soon. Singing, talking, yawning, sighing—any
vocalization we make occurs during the exhalation. Stough’ s students had
thin and weak voices because, he believed, they had thin and weak
exhalations. While directing choirs at W estminster Choir College in New Jersey ,
Stough began training his singers to exhale properly , to build up their
respiratory muscles and enlar ge their lungs. W ithin a few sessions, the
students were singing clearer , more robustly , and with added nuance. He
moved to North Carolina to conduct church choirs that went on to win
national competitions, and his choir appeared on a weekly program
broadcast nationally by Liberty Radio Network. Stough became so
renowned that he moved to New Y ork to retrain singers at the Metropolitan
Opera. In 1958, the administration of the East Orange V eterans Af fairs Hospital
in New Jersey called. “Y ou must know something about breathing that we
don’ t,” said Dr . Maurice J. Small, the chief of tuberculosis management. Small was wondering if Stough might be interested in training a new groupof students. None of them could sing, and a few couldn’ t walk or talk. They
were emphysema patients, and they were in desperate need of help. When Stough arrived at the East Orange hospital weeks later , he was
horrified. Dozens of patients were laid out on gurneys, each one jaundiced
and pale, their mouths craned open like fish, oxygen tubes pumping to no
avail. The hospital staf f didn’ t know what to do, so they just wheeled the
men across the waxed terrazzo floors and into a room hung with faded-
yellow tissue dispensers and American flag clocks, one patient beside the
other , waiting to die. It had gone this way for 50 years. “I foolishly had assumed that everyone had at least a rudimentary
knowledge of physiology ,” Stough wrote in his autobiography , Dr . Br eath . “Even more foolishly I had assumed that a universal awareness of the
importance of breathing existed. Nothing could have been farther from the
truth.”
Emphysema is a gradual deterioration of lung tissue marked by chronic
bronchitis and coughing. The lungs become so damaged that people with
the disease can no longer absorb oxygen ef fectively . They’re forced to take
several short breaths very fast, often breathing in far more air than they
need, but still feel out of breath. Emphysema had no known cure. The nurses, meaning well, had placed cushions under patients’ backs so
that their chests were arched up. The idea was to create elevation to ease
inhalations. Stough instantly saw that this was making the condition worse. Emphysema, he realized, was a disease of exhalation. The patients were
suf fering not because they couldn’ t get fresh air into their lungs, but
because they couldn’ t get enough stale air out. —
Normally , the blood coursing through our arteries and veins at any one time
does a full circuit once a minute, an average of 2,000 gallons of blood a
day . This regular and consistent blood flow is essential to delivering fresh
oxygenated blood to cells and removing waste. What influences much of the speed and strength of this circulation is the
thoracic pump, the name for the pressure that builds inside the chest when
we breathe. As we inhale, negative pressure draws blood into the heart; as
we exhale, blood shoots back out into the body and lungs, where it
recirculates. It’ s similar to the way the ocean floods into shore, then ebbs
out.And what powers the thoracic pump is the diaphragm, the muscle that
sits beneath the lungs in the shape of an umbrella. The diaphragm lifts
during exhalations, which shrinks the lungs, then it drops back down to
expand them during inhalations. This up-and-down movement occurs
within us some 50,000 times a day . A typical adult engages as little as 10 percent of the range of the
diaphragm when breathing, which overburdens the heart, elevates blood
pressure, and causes a rash of circulatory problems. Extending those breaths
to 50 to 70 percent of the diaphragm’ s capacity will ease cardiovascular
stress and allow the body to work more ef ficiently . For this reason, the
diaphragm is sometimes referred to as “ the second heart,” because it not
only beats to its own rhythm but also af fects the rate and strength of the
heartbeat. Stough discovered that the diaphragms in all of the East Orange
emphysema patients had broken down. X-rays showed that they were
extending their diaphragms by only a fraction of what was healthy , taking
only a sip of air with each breath. The patients had been sick so long that
many of the muscles and joints around their chests had atrophied and
stif fened; they had no muscle memory of breathing deep. Over the next two
months, Stough reminded them how . “My activities looked silly when observed from a distance, and they
seemed silly at the outset to the person with whom I worked,” wrote
Stough. He’d begin the treatments by putting patients flat on their backs, running
his hands across their torsos, and gently tapping on rigid muscles and
distended chests. He’d have them hold their breath and count from one to
five as many times in a row as they could. Next, he massaged their necks
and throats and lightly coaxed their ribs as he told them to inhale and exhale
very slowly , trying to wake the diaphragm from its long slumber . Each of
these exercises allowed the patients to let out a little more air so that a little
more air could get in. After several sessions, some patients learned to speak a full sentence in
a single breath for the first time in years. Others began walking. “One elderly man who had not been able to walk across the room not
only could walk but could walk up the hospital stairs, a remarkable feat for
an advanced emphysema patient,” Stough wrote. Another man, who hadn’ t
been able to breathe for more than 15 minutes without supplementaloxygen, was lasting eight hours. A 55-year -old man who had suf fered
advanced emphysema for eight years was able to leave the hospital and
captain a boat down to Florida. Before-and-after X-rays showed that Stough’ s patients were vastly
expanding their lung capacity in only a few weeks. Even more stunning,
they were training an involuntary muscle—the diaphragm—to lift higher
and drop lower . Administrators told Stough that this was medically
impossible; internal or gans and muscles cannot be developed, they said. At
one point, several doctors petitioned to ban Stough from treating patients
and kick him out of the hospital system. Stough was a choral teacher , not a
doctor , after all. But the X-rays didn’ t lie. T o confirm his results, Stough
began recording the first footage of a moving diaphragm, using a new X-ray
film technology called cinefluorography . Everyone was floored. “I told Carl in no uncertain words that he was mildly demented to say
that he could ef fect a rise in the diaphragm and a descent in the ribs, but
then in one patient we got rather spectacular results showing that he did do
this,” said Dr . Robert Nims, the chief of pulmonary medicine at the W est
Haven V A Hospital in Connecticut. “W e have shown that he’ s able to
decrease the volume of the lungs [via deep exhalations] more than any
pulmonary man would say it was possible.”
Stough hadn’ t found a way to reverse emphysema. Lung damage from
the disease is permanent. What he’d done is find a way to access the rest of
the lungs, the areas that were still functioning, and engage them on a lar ger
level. The “cure” Stough professed was de facto, but it worked. Over the next decade, Stough would take his treatment to a half-dozen
of the lar gest V A hospitals on the East Coast, sometimes working on
patients seven days a week. He’d go on to treat not only emphysema, but
asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, and more. The benefits of breathing, of harnessing the art of exhalation, Stough
found, extended not just to the chronically sick or to singers, but to
everyone. •       •       •
Back in L ynn Martin’ s apartment, I was reawakening my own slumbering
diaphragm on the living room futon. “This is not a massage,” Martin said,
making her point as she pressed a hand against my ribs. I drew soft andlong breaths deep into my abdomen while Martin helped loosen my rib
cage, trying to coax at least 50 percent of my maximum diaphragm
movement with each inhale and exhale. Breathing this way wasn’ t necessary , Martin told me. Our bodies can
survive on short and clipped breaths for decades, and many of us do. That
doesn’ t mean it’ s good for us. Over time, shallow breathing will limit the
range of our diaphragms and lung capacity and can lead to the high-
shouldered, chest-out, neck-extended posture common in those with
emphysema, asthma, and other respiratory problems. Fixing this breathing
and this posture, she told me, was relatively easy . After several rounds of deep breaths to open my rib cage, Martin asked
me to start counting from one to ten over and over with every exhale. “ 1, 2,
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10— then keep repeating it,” she
said. At the end of the exhale, when I was so out of breath I couldn’ t
vocalize anymore, I was to keep counting, but to do so silently , letting my
voice trail down into a “sub-whisper .”
I ran through a few rounds, counting quickly and loudly , then silently
mouthing the numbers.
_OceanofPDF.com_Breath_-_James_Nestor.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Luckily, those consequences were
spelled out by a Norwegian-American orthodontist and researcher chasing
very dif ferent ends. Egil P. Harvold’ s hideous experiments in the 1970s and 80s would not
go over well with PET A or with anyone who has ever really cared for
animals. W orking from a lab in San Francisco, he gathered a troop of rhesus
monkeys and stuf fed silicone deep into the nasal cavities of half of them,
leaving the other half as they were. The obstructed animals couldn’ t remove
the plugs, and they couldn’ t breathe at all through their noses. They were
forced to adapt to constant mouthbreathing. Over the next six months, Harvold measured the animals’ dental arches,
the angles of their chins, the length of their faces, and more. The plugged-
up monkeys developed the same downward growth pattern, the same
narrowing of the dental arch, crooked teeth, and gaping mouth. Harvold
repeated these experiments, keeping animals obstructed for two years. They
fared even worse. Along the way, he took a lot of pictures. The photographs are heart-wrenching, not only for the sake of the poor
monkeys, but because they also of fer such a clear reflection of what
happens to our own species: after just a few months, faces grew long, slack-
jawed, and glazed over. Mouthbreathing, it turns out, changes the physical body and transforms
airways, all for the worse. Inhaling air through the mouth decreases
pressure, which causes the soft tissues in the back of the mouth to become
loose and flex inward, creating less overall space and making breathing
more dif ficult. Mouthbreathing begets more mouthbreathing. Inhaling from the nose has the opposite ef fect. It forces air against all
those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and
breathing easier. After a while, these tissues and muscles get “toned” to stayin this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal
breathing. “Whatever happens to the nose af fects what’ s happening in the mouth,
the airways, the lungs,” said Patrick McKeown during a phone interview. He’ s a bestselling Irish author and one of the world’ s leading experts on
nasal breathing. “These aren’ t separate things that operate autonomously—
it’ s one united airway,” he told me. None of this should come as a surprise. When seasonal aller gies hit,
incidences of sleep apnea and breathing dif ficulties shoot up. The nose gets
stuf fed, we start mouthbreathing, and the airways collapse. “It’ s simple
physics,” McKeown told me. Sleeping with an open mouth exacerbates these problems. Whenever we
put our heads on a pillow, gravity pulls the soft tissues in the throat and
tongue down, closing of f the airway even more. After a while, our airways
get conditioned to this position; snoring and sleep apnea become the new
normal. •       •       •
It’ s the last night of the nasal obstruction phase of the experiment, and I am,
again, sitting up in bed and staring out the window. When a Pacific breeze blows in, which it does most nights, the shadows
of the trees and plants on the backyard wall across from my bedroom start
to move and groove in a chromatic kaleidoscope. One moment they
reor ganize into a cadre of Edward Gorey gentlemen in waistcoats, the next
into crooked Escher staircases. Another gust of wind, and these scenes
disintegrate and reform into recognizable stuf f: ferns, bamboo leaves,
bougainvillea. This is a long way of saying: I can’ t sleep. My head’ s been propped up
on pillows and I’ve been taking notes on this creepy tableau for 15, 20,
maybe 40 minutes. I unconsciously try to snif f and clear my nose, but
instead get a jolt of pain in my head. It’ s a sinus headache, and in my case,
self-inflicted. Each night for the past week and a half, I’ve felt as if I was getting
softly choked to death in my sleep and my throat was closing in on itself. Because it is, and because I am. Forced mouthbreathing was very likely
changing the shape of my airways, just as it did with Harvold’ s monkeys. The changes weren’ t happening in a matter of months, either, but days. It
was getting worse with every breath I took. My snoring has increased 4,820 percent from ten days ago. For the first
time that I’m aware of, I’m beginning to suf fer from obstructive sleep
apnea. At my worst, I’ve averaged 25 “apnea events,” meaning I was
choking so severely that my oxygen levels dropped to below 85 percent. Whenever oxygen falls below 90 percent, the blood can’ t carry enough
of it to support body tissues. If this goes on too long, it can lead to heart
failure, depression, memory problems, and early death. My snoring and
sleep apnea are still far below that of any medically diagnosed condition,
but these scores were getting worse the longer I stayed plugged up. Every morning Olsson and I would listen to recordings of ourselves
sleeping the night before. W e laughed at first, then we got a bit frightened:
what we heard weren’ t the sounds of happy Dickensian drunks, but of men
being strangled to death by our own bodies. “ More wholesome to sleep. with the mouth shut,” wrote Levinus
Lemnius, a Dutch physician from the 1500s who was credited as one of the
first researchers to study snoring. Even back then, Levinus knew how
injurious obstructive breathing during sleep could be. “For they that sleep
with their Jaws extended, by reason of their breath, and the air tossed to and
fro, have their tongues and palates dry, and desire to be moistened by
drinking in the night. ”
This was another thing that kept happening to me. Mouthbreathing
causes the body to lose 40 percent more water. I felt this all night, every
night, waking up constantly parched and dry. Y ou’d think this moisture loss
would decrease the need to urinate, but, oddly, the opposite was true. During the deepest, most restful stages of sleep, the pituitary gland, a
pea-size ball at the base of the brain, secretes hormones that control the
release of adrenaline, endorphins, growth hormone, and other substances,
including vasopressin, which communicates with cells to store more water. This is how animals can sleep through the night without feeling thirsty or
needing to relieve themselves. But if the body has inadequate time in deep sleep, as it does when it
experiences chronic sleep apnea, vasopressin won’ t be secreted normally. The kidneys will release water, which triggers the need to urinate and
signals to our brains that we should consume more liquid. W e get thirsty,
and we need to pee more. A lack of vasopressin explains not only my ownirritable bladder but the constant, seemingly unquenchable thirst I have
every night. There are several books that describe the horrendous health ef fects of
snoring and sleep apnea. They explain how these af flictions lead to bed-
wetting, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), diabetes, high
blood pressure, cancer, and so on. I’d read a report from the Mayo Clinic
which found that chronic insomnia, long assumed to be a psychological
problem, is often a breathing problem. The millions of Americans who have
a chronic insomnia disorder and who are, right now, like me, staring out
bedroom windows, or at TVs, phones, or ceilings, can’ t sleep because they
can’ t breathe. And contrary to what most of us might think, no amount of snoring is
normal, and no amount of sleep apnea comes without risks of serious health
ef fects. Dr. Christian Guilleminault, a sleep researcher at Stanford, found
that children who experienced no apnea events at all—only heavy breathing
and light snoring, or “ increased respiratory ef fort”—could suf fer from
mood disorders, blood pressure derangements, learning disabilities, and
more. Mouthbreathing was also making me dumber. A recent Japanese study
showed that rats who had their nostrils obstructed and were forced to
breathe through their mouths developed fewer brain cells and took twice as
long to make their way through a maze than nasal-breathing controls. Another Japanese study in humans from 2013 found that mouthbreathing
delivered a disturbance of oxygen to the prefrontal cortex, the area of the
brain associated with ADHD. Nasal breathing had no such ef fects. The ancient Chinese were onto it as well. “ The breath inhaled through
the mouth is called ‘Ni Ch’i, adverse breath,’ which is extremely harmful,”
states a passage from the T ao. “Be careful not to have the breath inhaled
through the mouth. ”
As I lie in bed tossing and turning, fighting the ur ge to run to the
bathroom again, I’m trying to focus on the positive, and am reminded of a
skull from Marianna Evans’ s collection that of fered a much-needed dose of
hope. •       •       •It was morning, and Evans was seated in front of an oversize computer
monitor in the administrative of fice of her orthodontics practice, about a
half hour west of downtown Philadelphia. W ith white walls and white-tiled
floors, the place looked futuristic. It was the opposite of the tan-stucco
strip-mall blocks with ferns, goldfish tanks, and Robert Doisneau prints of
all the dental of fices I’d been to. Evans, I learned, ran a dif ferent kind of
practice. She brought up two images on a computer monitor, one of an ancient
skull from the Morton Collection, and the other of a young girl, a new
patient. I’ll call her Gigi. Gigi was about seven in the photo. Her teeth jutted
from the top of her gums, outward, inward, and in all directions. There were
dark circles under her eyes; her lips were chapped and open as if she were
sucking on an imaginary Popsicle. She suf fered from chronic snoring,
sinusitis, and asthma. She’d just started developing aller gies to foods, dust,
and pets. Gigi grew up in a wealthy household. She followed the Food Guide
Pyramid, got plenty of outdoor exercise, had her immunizations, took
vitamins D and C, and had no illnesses growing up. And yet, here she was. “I see patients like this all day,” said Evans. “They are all the same. ”
And here we are. Ninety percent of children have acquired some degree
of deformity in their mouths and noses. Forty-five percent of adults snore
occasionally, and a quarter of the population snores constantly. T wenty-five
percent of American adults over 30 choke on themselves because of sleep
apnea; and an estimated 80 percent of moderate or severe cases are
undiagnosed. Meanwhile, the majority of the population suf fers from some
form of breathing dif ficulty or resistance. W e’ve found ways to clean up our cities and to tame or kill of f so many
of the diseases that destroyed our ancestors. W e’ve become more literate,
taller, and stronger. On average, we live three times longer than people in
the Industrial Age. There are now seven and a half billion humans on the
planet—a thousand times more people than there were 10,000 years ago. And yet we’ve lost touch with our most basic and important biological
function. Evans painted a depressing picture. And the irony wasn’ t lost on me as I
sat in a sparkling clinic looking at one modern face after another and
comparing them with the ideal form and perfect teeth of Samuel Morton’ s
specimens, which he derided as “Australians and degraded Hottentots. ” Atone point I scooted closer and saw my reflection in the monitor glass—that
mangle of disjointed bones, the sloping jaw, stuf fy nose, and mouth too
small to fit all its teeth. Y ou fools,  I imagined that ancient skull saying. And
for a moment, I swear, it looked like it was laughing. But Evans hadn’ t invited me to see her research just to lament the
present; her obsession with tracing the decline of human breathing is just a
starting point. She’d studied it for years, entirely at her own expense,
because she wants to help. She and her colleague, Kevin Boyd, are using
the hundreds of measurements they’ve taken from ancient skulls to build a
new model of airway health for modern humans. They are part of a
bur geoning group of pulmonauts exploring novel therapies in breathing,
lung expansion, orthodontics, and airway development. Their goal is to help
return Gigi, me, and everyone else to our more perfect, ancient forms—the
way we were before it all went haywire. On the computer screen, Evans pulled up another photo. It was Gigi
again, but in this shot there were no dark circles, none of the sallow skin or
drooping lids. Her teeth were straight and her face was broad and glowing. She was nasal breathing again and no longer snored. Her aller gies and other
respiratory problems had all but disappeared. The photograph was taken
two years after the first, and Gigi looked transformed. The same thing happened with other patients—both adults and children
—who’d regained the ability to breathe properly: their slack-jawed and
narrowed faces morphed back into a more natural configuration. They saw
their high blood pressure drop, depression abate, headaches disappear. Harvold’ s monkeys recovered, too. After two years of forced
mouthbreathing, he removed the silicone plugs. Slowly, surely, the animals
relearned how to breathe through their noses. And slowly, surely, their faces
and airways remodeled: jaws moved forward and facial structure and
airways morphed back into their wide and natural state. Six months after the experiment ended, the monkeys looked like
monkeys again, because they were breathing normally again. —
Back in my bedroom, staring out at the shadow play of branches in the
window, I’m hoping that I too can reverse whatever damage I’d done in the
last ten days, and the past four decades. I’m hoping I can relearn to breathe
the way my ancestors breathed. I suppose I’ll see soon enough. T omorrow morning, the plugs come out. Part Two
THE LOST ART AND SCIENCE OF
BREATHINGThree
NOSE
“Y ou look like shit,” says Dr. Nayak. It’ s early afternoon and I’m back at the Stanford Department of
Otolaryngology Head and Neck Sur gery Center. I’m splayed out on the
examination chair while Nayak nudges an endoscope up my right nostril. The smooth desert dunes I journeyed through ten days ago look like they’ve
been hit by a hurricane. I’ll skip the details; let’ s just say my nasal cavity is
a mess. “Now your favorite part,” says Nayak, chuckling. Before I sneeze or can
consider running away, he grabs the wire brush and pushes it a few inches
into my head. “It’ s pretty soupy in there,” he says, sounding somewhat
pleased. He repeats with the left nostril, places the gunk-covered RNA
brushes into a test tube, then scoots me out of the way. For the past week and a half I’d been waiting for this moment. I’d
anticipated removing these plugs and tape and cotton to be a celebratory
scene involving high-fives and nasal sighs of relief. I could breathe like a
healthy human again. In reality, it’ s minutes of discomfort followed by more obstruction. My
nose is such a mess that Nayak has to grab a pair of pliers and insert several
inches of cotton swabs into each nostril to keep whatever is up there from
spilling onto the floor. Then it’ s back to the pulmonary function tests, an X-
ray, the phlebotomist, and the rhinologist, repeating all the tests Olsson and
I took before the obstruction phase. The results will be ready in a few
weeks. —It’ s not until I get home that evening and rinse my sinuses several times that
I can take a first full breath through my nose. I grab a coat and walk
barefoot to the backyard. There are wispy plumes of cirrus clouds moving
across the night sky, as big as spaceships. Above them, a few stubborn stars
punch through the mist and cluster around a waxing moon. I exhale stale air from my chest and take in a breath. I smell the sour,
old-sock stink of mud. The black-label ChapStick of the damp doormat. A
L ysol whif f of the lemon tree and the anise tinge of dying leaves. Each of these scents, this material in the world, explodes in my head in a
T echnicolor burst. The scents are so sparkled and alarming that I can almost
see them—a billion colored dots in a Seurat painting. As I take in another
breath, I imagine all these molecules passing down my throat and into my
lungs, pushing deeper into my bloodstream, where they provide fuel for
thoughts and the sensations that made them. Smell is life’ s oldest sense. Standing here alone, nostrils flaring, it
occurs to me that breathing is so much more than just getting air into our
bodies. It’ s the most intimate connection to our surroundings. Everything you or I or any other breathing thing has ever put in its
mouth, or in its nose, or soaked in through its skin, is hand-me-down space
dust that’ s been around for 13. 8 billion years. This wayward matter has
been split apart by sunlight, spread throughout the universe, and come back
together again. T o breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to
take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves back
out. Respiration is, at its core, reciprocation. Respiration, I’m hoping, can also lead to restoration. Starting today, I
will attempt to heal whatever damage has been done to my body over the
past ten days of mouthbreathing and try to ensure ongoing health in the
future. I’ll put into practice several thousand years of teachings from
several dozen pulmonauts, breaking down their methods and measuring the
ef fects. W orking with Olsson, I’ll explore techniques to expand the lungs,
develop the diaphragm, flood the body with oxygen, hack the autonomic
nervous system, stimulate immune response, and reset chemoreceptors in
the brain. The first step is the recovery phase I’ve just done. T o breathe through
my nose, all day and all night. The nose is crucial because it clears air, heats it, and moistens it for
easier absorption. Most of us know this. But what so many people neverconsider is the nose’ s unexpected role in problems like erectile dysfunction. Or how it can trigger a cavalcade of hormones and chemicals that lower
blood pressure and ease digestion. How it responds to the stages of a
woman’ s menstrual cycle. How it regulates our heart rate, opens the vessels
in our toes, and stores memories. How the density of your nasal hairs helps
determine whether you’ll suf fer from asthma. Few of us ever consider how the nostrils of every living person pulse to
their own rhythm, opening and closing like a flower in response to our
moods, mental states, and perhaps even the sun and the moon. •       •       •
Thirteen hundred years ago, an ancient T antric text, the Shiva Swar odaya,
described how one nostril will open to let breath in as the other will softly
close throughout the day. Some days, the right nostril yawns awake to greet
the sun; other days, the left awakens to the fullness of the moon. According
to the text, these rhythms are the same throughout every month and they’re
shared by all humanity. It’ s a method our bodies use to stay balanced and
grounded to the rhythms of the cosmos, and each other. In 2004, an Indian sur geon named Dr. Ananda Balayogi Bhavanani
attempted to scientifically test the Shiva Swar odaya  patterns on an
international group of subjects. Over the course of a month, he found that
when the influence of the sun and moon on the Earth was at its strongest—
during a full or new moon—the students consistently shared the Shiva
Swar odaya  pattern. Bhavanani admitted the data were anecdotal and much more research
would be needed to prove that all humans shared in this pattern. Still,
scientists have known for more than a century that the nostrils do  pulse to
their own beat, that they do open and close like flowers throughout the day
and night. The phenomenon, called nasal cycles, was first described in 1895 by a
German physician named Richard Kayser. He noticed that the tissue lining
one nostril of his patients seemed to quickly congest and close while the
other would mysteriously open. Then, after about 30 minutes to 4 hours, the
nostrils switched, or “cycled. ” The shifting appeared to be influenced less
by the moon’ s mysterious pull and more by sexual ur ges. The interior of the nose, it turned out, is blanketed with erectile tissue,
the same flesh that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples. Noses get
erections. W ithin seconds, they too can engor ge with blood and become
lar ge and stif f. This happens because the nose is more intimately connected
to the genitals than any other or gan; when one gets aroused, the other
responds. The mere thought of sex for some people causes such severe
bouts of nasal erections that they’ll have trouble breathing and will start to
sneeze uncontrollably, an inconvenient condition called “ honeymoon
rhinitis. ” As sexual stimulation weakens and erectile tissue becomes flaccid,
the nose will, too. After Kayser ’ s discovery, decades passed and nobody of fered a good
reason for why the human nose was lined with erectile tissue, or why the
nostrils cycled. There were many theories: some believed this switching
provoked the body to flip over from side to side while sleeping to prevent
bedsores. (Breathing is easier through the nostril opposite the pillow. ) Others thought the cycling helped protect the nose from respiratory
infection and aller gies, while still others ar gued that alternate airflow allows
us to smell odors more ef ficiently. What researchers eventually managed to confirm was that nasal erectile
tissue mirrored states of health. It would become inflamed during sickness
or other states of imbalance. If the nose became infected, the nasal cycle
became more pronounced and switched back and forth quickly. The right
and left nasal cavities also worked like an HV AC system, controlling
temperature and blood pressure and feeding the brain chemicals to alter our
moods, emotions, and sleep states. The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through
this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol
levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because
breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic
nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a
more elevated state of alertness and readiness. Breathing through the right
nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain,
specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical
decisions, language, and computing. Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite ef fect: it works as a
kind of brake system to the right nostril’ s accelerator. The left nostril is
more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers temperature and blood pressure, cools the body,
and reduces anxiety. Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite
side of the prefrontal cortex, the right area that plays a role in creative
thought, emotions, formation of mental abstractions, and negative emotions. In 2015, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, recorded
the breathing patterns of a schizophrenic woman over the course of three
consecutive years and found that she had a “significantly greater” left-
nostril dominance. This breathing habit, they hypothesized, was likely
overstimulating the right-side “creative part” of her brain, and as a result
prodding her imagination to run amok. Over several sessions, the
researchers taught her to breathe through her opposite, “logical” nostril, and
she experienced far fewer hallucinations. Our bodies operate most ef ficiently in a state of balance, pivoting
between action and relaxation, daydreaming and reasoned thought. This
balance is influenced by the nasal cycle, and may even be controlled by it. It’ s a balance that can also be gamed. There’ s a yoga practice dedicated to manipulating the body’ s functions
with forced breathing through the nostrils. It’ s called nadi shodhana —in
Sanskrit, nadi  means “channel” and shodhana  means “purification”—or,
more commonly, alternate nostril breathing. —
I’ve been conducting an informal study of alternate nostril breathing for the
past several minutes. It’ s the second day of the nasal breathing “Recovery” phase, and I’m
sitting in my living room, my elbows on the cluttered dining room table,
softly sucking air through my right nostril, pausing for five seconds, and
then blowing it out. There are dozens of alternate nostril breathing techniques. I’ve started
with the most basic. It involves placing an index finger over the left nostril
and then inhaling and exhaling only through the right. I did this two dozen
times after each meal today, to heat up my body and aid my digestion. Before meals, and any other time I wanted to relax, I’d switch sides,
repeating the same exercise with my left nostril open. T o gain focus and
balance the body and mind, I followed a technique called surya bheda
pranayama, which involves taking one breath into the right nostril, then
exhaling through the left for several rounds. These exercises felt great. Sitting here after a few rounds, I sense an
immediate and potent clarity and relaxation, even a floatiness. As
advertised, I’ve been entirely free of any gastroesophageal reflux. I haven’ t
registered the slightest stomach ache. Alternate nostril breathing appeared
to have delivered these benefits, but these techniques, I’d found, were
usually fleeting, lasting only 30 minutes or so. The real transformation in my body over the last 24 hours came from
another practice: letting my nasal erectile tissues flex of their own accord,
naturally adjusting the flow of air to suit the needs of my body and brain. It
happened because of simply breathing through my nose. As I’m quietly contemplating all this, Olsson comes bar ging in. “Good
afternoon. ” he yells. He’ s wearing his shorts and Abercrombie sweatshirt,
and he plops down across from me while placing a blood-pressure cuf f
around his right arm. This is the same position he’ s assumed for the last
eleven days straight, in pretty much the same clothes. T oday, however,
there’ s no bandage, nose clip, or silicone plugs up his nose. He’ s also
breathing freely through his nostrils, taking in easy and silent inhales and
exhales. His face is flushed, he’ s sitting upright, and he’ s so keyed up with
ener gy that he can’ t stay still. I figured that some of our new, bright outlook on life was psychosomatic
until a few minutes later, when we checked our measurements. My systolic
blood pressure had dropped from 142 ten days ago—a deep state of stage 2
hypertension—to 124, still a bit high but just a few points from a healthy
range. My heart rate variability increased by more than 150 percent, and my
carbon dioxide levels rose around 30 percent, taking me from a state of
hypocapnia, which can cause dizziness, numbness in the fingers, and mental
confusion, and placing me squarely within the medically normal zone. Olsson showed similar improvements. And there’ s potential for much more. Because pulsing nasal cycles are
only a small part of the nose’ s vital functions. Imagine for a moment that you’re holding a billiard ball at eye level a
few inches from your face. Then imagine slowly pushing that entire ball
inside the center of your face. The volume the ball would take up, some six
cubic inches, is equivalent to the total space of all the cavities and
passageways that make up the interior of the adult nose. In a single breath, more molecules of air will pass through your nose
than all the grains of sand on all the world’ s beaches—trillions and trillionsof them. These little bits of air come from a few feet or several yards away. As they make their way toward you, they’ll twist and spool like the stars in
a van Gogh sky, and they’ll keep twisting and spooling and scrolling as they
pass into you, traveling at a clip of about five miles per hour. What directs this rambling path are turbinates, six maze-like bones
(three on each side) that begin at the opening of your nostrils and end just
below your eyes. The turbinates are coiled in such a way that if you split
them apart, they’d look like a seashell, which is how they got their other
name, nasal concha, after the conch shell. Crustaceans use their elaborately
designed shells to filter impurities and keep invaders out. So do we. The lower turbinates at the opening of the nostrils are covered in that
pulsing erectile tissue, itself covered in mucous membrane, a nappy sheen
of cells that moistens and warms breath to your body temperature while
simultaneously filtering out particles and pollutants. All these invaders
could cause infection and irritation if they got into the lungs; the mucus is
the body’ s “ first line of defense. ” It’ s constantly on the move, sweeping
along at a rate of about half an inch every minute, more than 60 feet per
day. Like a giant conveyor belt, it collects inhaled debris in the nose, then
moves all the junk down the throat and into the stomach, where it’ s
sterilized by stomach acid, delivered to the intestines, and sent out of your
body. This conveyor belt doesn’ t just move by itself. It’ s pushed along by
millions of tiny, hair -like structures called cilia. Like a field of wheat in the
wind, cilia sway with each inhale and exhale, but do so at a fast clip of up to
16 beats per second. Cilia closer to the nostrils gyrate at a dif ferent rhythm
than those farther along, their movements creating a coordinated wave that
keeps mucus moving deeper. The cilia grip is so strong that it can even push
against the force of gravity. No matter what position the nose (and head) is
in, whether it’ s upside down or right-side up, the cilia will keep pushing
inward and down. W orking together, the dif ferent areas of the turbinates will heat, clean,
slow, and pressurize air so that the lungs can extract more oxygen with each
breath. This is why nasal breathing is far more healthy and ef ficient than
breathing through the mouth. As Nayak explained when I first met him, the
nose is the silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our
minds, and weather vane to our emotions. •       •       •
The magic of the nose, and its healing powers, wasn’ t lost on the ancients. Around 1500 BCE, the Ebers Papyrus, one of the oldest medical texts
ever discovered, of fered a description of how nostrils were supposed to feed
air to the heart and lungs, not the mouth. A thousand years later, Genesis
2:7 described how “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul. ” A Chinese T aoist text from the eighth century AD  noted that the nose
was the “heavenly door,” and that breath must be taken in through it. “Never do otherwise,” the text warned, “for breath would be in danger and
illness would set in. ”
But it wasn’ t until the nineteenth century that the W estern population
ever considered the glories of nasal breathing. It happened thanks to an
adventurous artist and researcher named Geor ge Catlin. By 1830, Catlin had left what he called a “dry and tedious” job as a
lawyer to become a portrait painter for Philadelphia’ s high society. He
became well-known for his depictions of governors and aristocrats, but all
the pomp and pretention of polite society did not impress him. Although his
health was failing, Catlin yearned to be far away in nature, to capture rawer
and more real depictions of humanity. He packed a gun, several canvases, a
few paintbrushes, and headed west. Catlin would spend the next six years
traveling thousands of miles throughout the Great Plains, covering more
distance than Lewis and Clark to document the lives of 50 Native American
tribes. He went up the Missouri to live with the Lakota Sioux. He met with the
Pawnee, Omaha, Cheyenne, and Blackfeet. Along the banks of the Upper
Missouri, he happened upon the civilization of the Mandan, a mysterious
tribe whose members stood six feet tall and lived in bubble-shaped houses. Many had luminous blue eyes and snow-white hair. Catlin realized that nobody really knew about the Mandan, or other
Plains tribes, because no one of European descent had bothered to spend
time talking to them, researching them, living with them, and learning about
their beliefs and traditions. “ I am traveling this country, as I have before said, not to advance or to
prove theories, but to see all I am able to see and to tell it in the simplest
and most intelligible manner I can to the world, for their own conclusions,”Catlin wrote. He would paint some 600 portraits and take hundreds of pages
of notes, forming what famed author Peter Matthiessen would call “ the first,
last, and only complete record ever made of the Plains Indians at the height
of their splendid culture. ”
The tribes varied region by region, with dif ferent customs, traditions,
and diets. Some, like the Mandan, ate only buf falo flesh and maize, while
others lived on venison and water, and still others harvested plants and
flowers. The tribes looked dif ferent, too, with varying hair colors, facial
features, and skin tones. And yet Catlin marveled at the fact that all 50 tribes seemed to share the
same superhuman physical characteristics. In some groups, such as the
Crow and the Osage, Catlin wrote there were few men, “at their full growth,
who are less than six feet in stature, and very many of them six and a half,
and others seven feet. ” They all seemed to share a Herculean make of broad
shoulders and barrel chests. The women were nearly as tall and just as
striking. Having never seen a dentist or doctor, the tribal people had teeth that
were perfectly straight—“as regular as the keys of a piano,” Catlin noted. Nobody seemed to get sick, and deformities and other chronic health
problems appeared rare or nonexistent. The tribes attributed their vigorous
health to a medicine, what Catlin called the “great secret of life. ” The secret
was breathing. The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through
the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress
and disease. On the other hand, breath inhaled through the nose kept the
body strong, made the face beautiful, and prevented disease. “The air which
enters the lungs is as dif ferent from that which enters the nostrils as distilled
water is dif ferent from the water in an ordinary cistern or a frog-pond,” he
wrote. Healthy nasal breathing started at birth. Mothers in all these tribes
followed the same practices, carefully closing the baby’ s lips with their
fingers after each feeding. At night, they’d stand over sleeping infants and
gently pinch mouths shut if they opened. Some Plains tribes strapped
infants to a straight board and placed a pillow beneath their heads, creating
a posture that made it much harder to breathe through the mouth. During
winter, infants would be wrapped in light clothing and then held at arm’ slength on warmer days so they’d be less prone to get too hot and begin
panting. All these methods trained children to breathe through their noses, all
day, every day. It was a habit they would carry with them the rest of their
lives. Catlin described how adult tribal members would even resist smiling
with an open mouth, fearing some noxious air might get in. This practice
was as “old and unchangeable as their hills,” he wrote, and it was shared
universally throughout the tribes for millennia. —
T wenty years after Catlin explored the W est, he set of f again, at age 56, to
live with indigenous cultures in the Andes, Ar gentina, and Brazil. He
wanted to know if “medicinal” breathing practices extended beyond the
Plains. They did. Every tribe Catlin visited over the next several years—
dozens of them—shared the same breathing habits. It was no coincidence,
he reported, that they also shared the same vigorous health, perfect teeth,
and forward-growing facial structure. He wrote about his experiences in
The Br eath of Life, published in 1862. The book was devoted solely to
documenting the wonders of nasal breathing and the hazards of
mouthbreathing. Catlin was not only a chronicler of breathing methods; he was a
practitioner. Nasal breathing saved his life. As a boy, Catlin snored and was wracked with one respiratory problem
after another. By the time he reached his 30s and first went out W est, these
problems had become so severe that he’d sometimes spit up blood. His
friends were convinced he had lung disease. Every night Catlin feared he
would die. “I became fully convinced of the danger of the habit [mouthbreathing],
and resolved to overcome it,” he wrote. Through “sternness of resolution
and perseverance,” Catlin forced his mouth closed while he slept and
always breathed through his nose during waking hours. Soon, there were no
more aches, pains, or bleeding. By his mid-30s, Catlin reported feeling
healthier and stronger than at any other time in his life. “I at length
completely conquered an insidious enemy that was nightly attacking me in
my helpless position, and evidently fast hurrying me to the grave,” he
wrote. Geor ge Catlin would live to be 76, about double the average life
expectancy at the time. He credited his longevity to the “great secret of
life”: to always  breathe through the nose. •       •       •
It’ s the third night of the nasal breathing phase of the experiment, and I’m
sitting up in bed reading, taking slow and easy breaths through my nose. I’m not breathing this way out of some “constant adult conviction,” as
Catlin wrote. I’m doing it because my lips are taped shut. Catlin suggested tying a bandage around the jaw at night, but that
sounded dangerous and dif ficult, so I opted for another technique, which I’d
heard about months earlier from a dentist who runs a private practice in
Silicon V alley.
He stuffed silicone deep into the nasal cavities of half of the monkeys, while leaving the other half unobstructed.
What did Dr. Harvold do to the monkeys in his experiment?
They developed a downward growth pattern, narrowing of the dental arch, crooked teeth, and a gaping mouth.
What happened to the monkeys that were forced to breathe through their mouths?
The monkeys developed the same negative effects as the human subjects, including sleep apnea and chronic insomnia.
What did Dr. Harvold find out about the effects of mouthbreathing on the body?
She used a technique called "orthopedic breathing" to help her patients expand their lung capacity and improve their overall health.
What did Dr. Martin do to help her patients with emphysema?
The texts state that the nasal cycle helps to keep the body and mind balanced, and that it plays a crucial role in maintaining overall health and well-being.
What is the purpose of the nasal cycle, according to ancient Chinese and Indian texts?