Breath

I find that I'm usually not quite the intended audience for most popular science writing, so I can end up sounding overly critical of books I have actually enjoyed.  The genre frequently leaves me as frustrated by its incompleteness and lack of depth as it does intrigued by the research it covers.  While James Nestor's bestseller is no exception to this pattern, I would still recommend the book.  I haven't seen anyone else cover, even superficially, this many aspects of breathing in one place.  The topic is simply so interesting that it shines despite the breezy, introductory, should-be-read-at-1.5X quality to the writing. 

Nestor begins with a discussion of the evolutionary changes in human head and neck structure caused by our adaptation to cooked food.  These seem to have made breathing inherently more problematic for us than for any other mammal.  In modern times, we've compounded these problems by adopting softer diets that exercise our jaws less, as well as by living in that state of chronic low grade tension otherwise known as "civilization".  All of these changes make it more difficult to breathe effectively through our noses and to take full, deep breaths.  And this is apparently very bad for us.  

Nestor goes on to explain some of the reasons for why this is bad, and some of the ways we can combat it.  But he's more interested in striking anecdotes about rogue research than in consensus science, so most of these come off as pretty sketchy and not always coherent.  For example, he sometimes tells us that what we really want to do is learn to tolerate higher levels of carbon dioxide in the blood by extending our exhale and breathing much more slowly than we often do.  At other points he encourages us to breathe much harder, almost to the point hyperventilation, in the style popularized by Wim Hof.  Then again, maybe we should use yogic breathing techniques like alternate nostril breathing and etc ...  To sort out which of these partially contradictory ideas actually has any scientific support would require an extended tour through Nestor's bibliography (a very nice resource to have online).  While that might be an interesting project, I imagine the correct conclusion is likely predictably underwhelming: it depends.  The 'best' breathing techniques are wildly likely to depend on how you are and what you want to accomplish.  And this is of course precisely why these techniques are hard to study scientifically.  Which means that Nestor's book is ultimately most useful as a survey of possible ways to breath that we can experiment with personally.  So I'm excited to go through his instructional videos and see what happens.