Humans are Weird- Free Diving
When I was a kid, was taught the rule of 3, which is meant to be a general survivalist guide rule of thumb for necessities in extreme circumstances. If you haven’t heard it the rule of three is as follows:
The point being that without these things at this frequency that’s probably about when you’d die without them, so prioritize them in the reverse order.
And this is fairly consistent with most medical information I could find, these guidelines are a little under the ‘official’ times. Without oxygen is four to six minutes before brain damage, which that’s fair to be conservative for potentially life saving information.
Then, I learned about free diving.
You know how we have a Frenchman who invented a self contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) because he wanted to keep looking at the fish down in the ocean. Yeah so free diving is that… without SCUBA gear.
Free divers just hold their breath, and dive, down to 20 to 40 feet under water, which by the way means that they are under two atmospheres of pressure (2 atm is 33 feet for those keeping score) and then hang out and surface. Like it didn’t take a Frenchman obsessed with fish to come up with a pressurized air tank apparatus for normal people to do it.
The normal average human can hold their breath between 30 to 90 seconds.
That’s normal, and then most people after three to four minutes will have passed out and start to have their brain cells begin being damaged from lack of oxygen.
Do you know how long average free divers can hold their breath? Upwards of 10 minutes. That is a TEN TIMES longer breath hold than the ‘average’ human, with NO adverse effects!
The record breath hold is almost 25 minutes. 25 MINUTES.
That discrepancy is entirely unreasonable!
That’s like saying, oh yeah, the average human can move 100 pounds (~45 Kg) with serious effort, which is like the size of a large dog, but some of them can lift 1000 pounds, which is like a fully grown moose. Keeping with this analogy for the record breath hold if it was a weight would be the equivalent of someone saying they could lift an Elephant!
Then, and then, I looked further into it because surely these people have to have some kind of genetic quirk that allows them to be able to hold their breath PAST the, ‘yeah you’re probably dead zone’ three times over.
But no… not really. There are some exceptions of people that have larger or more effecient spleens that let them stay down closer to twenty to twenty five minutes, but mostly, it’s just getting the body used to having high C02 and low 02 levels over an extended period of time.
The average person can probably reach about 5 minute breath holds within a month of training, and have no adverse effects from this. Remember that the 'average human’ could only hold their breath for 30 to 90 seconds. Remember that rule of three? Remember that four minutes was 'hey the human might get brain damage’ you know their most important and vital organ that their evolution invested so heavily in that it literally changed the way they breath as a species?
Yeah. We’re just going to break that right down by just choosing to not listen to it. And within a month, BAM literally defying death, because some people just felt like it and figured out how to do it with training instead of equipment.
Because people wanted to go into a place that is VERY MUCH NOT MEANT FOR AIR BREATHING HUMANS to either look at stuff in the NOT FOR HUMANS zone, or to eat said stuff in the again HUMANS LITERALLY SHOULDN’T BE ABLE TO BE ALIVE HERE FOR MORE THAN A COUPLE OF MINUTES ZONE.
Humans are insane, and utterly terrifying.
