Breath by James Nestor

Some of the facts in this book would take your breath away. Digging up all kinds of elusive lore about breathing, journalist James Nestor delves deeply into his subject. His research goes beyond scientific laboratories to track down a number of knowledgeable amateurs. He also takes part in many breathing experiments.

At Stanford, he is joined by a fellow guinea pig, a Swede called Anders Olsson, to participate in an experiment that records the physiological effects of mouth breathing. Having their nostrils blocked, both experimental subjects demonstrate that breathing through the mouth raises the blood pressure and disrupts sleep. On the other hand, Nestor’s snoring stops when the experimenters make sure he breathes through his nose by taping his lips lightly together.

The book, which describes a wealth of breathing techniques, many of them ancient, is also full of arcane and amazing facts. Who knew how our teeth have changed since the advent of foods that require little chewing, and how important vigorous chewing is to our health, physiology and breathing?

I was also amazed to learn of the potentially dire consequences of a condition many people suffer from these days, “continuous partial attention.” As our minds wander between scanning email, writing, tweeting, making notes and more, we remain in a state of “perpetual distraction.” This keeps our breathing shallow and erratic, as the US National Institute of health has determined through studying it. Dubbed email apnea, this chronic half-attention contributes to “the same maladies as sleep apnea.”

Our breath cycles between left and right nostril dominance, a fact well-known both to scientists and to proponents of a meditative technique called alternate nostril breathing. The right nostril, which Nestor calls a kind of “gas pedal,” activates the sympathetic nervous system, while the right one activates the parasympathetic and works as a brake. At the University of California, when one schizophrenic patient with left-nostril dominance was taught over a period of months to breathe through her right, or “logical” nostril, she suffered fewer hallucinations.

Astonishingly, even scoliosis, an inherited curvature of the spine, can respond to conscious breathing techniques. Between the ages of 16 and 21, a scoliotic woman called Katharina Schroth developed and practiced an “orthopedic breathing” technique. Incredibly, five years of this practice straightened her backbone.

Long in the making, Nestor’s thoroughly researched book is both informative and astonishing.