Apnea promotes genius (extreme intellectual ability)?

Originally posted by Erik
In Canada where I used to live, the so-called "liberal-left" paper was at a grade 6 level and the "conservative-right" paper was at a grade 3 to 4 level. Remember that I am talking about a North American grade level, which tends to be lower than other countries such as the UK and Cuba, so we're talking LOW levels here
Gabriel, keep posting please
Cheers,
Erik Y.

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education in north america is something im not fond of(not just because of the going to school part) people here are to worried about all the politics

the ones that make the curriculum, those that make the decisions seem to forget that kids (like me :wave ) are subject to everything they do, every decision they make effects how we learn, yet they toss ideas at us like they toss out trash (ok, bad analogy)

very interesting observations! Yes, it appears that the media (in this case TV and Newspapers) want to shorten our attention span and therefore contract our mind.

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i wouldnt just limit this attention span shortening to the TV and newspapers, i would say that even schools, offices, and even society in general is WANTING to shorten its attention span
it seems to me that all of this "modern" technology, all the new things we have these days are based on technology that was invented atleast some 30 to 40 years ago and it seems that these "new" concepts are merely advances made on old concepts

Any kind of vigorous aerobic exercise, such as jogging or stair-stepping, will increase your CO2 level and improve circulation to your brain. Underwater swimming, however, is far more effective, in my opinion, than any other type of exercise.

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i would have to agree with this statement (and what it implies, that sports would make someone think clearer) every time i go to school people try to get me to be "smarter" teachers want me to learn another theory, they want me to be able to regurgitate what they teach me in an instant, but here is where the fundamental flaw (in my opinion) lays, people are no longer interested in understanding, they simply want to know something, they want to be able to apply it in situations as presented when they learned the concept, they dont really care WHY it works, as long as it does work,

here is also where i see the major difference between "athletes" (as refered to in the above quote) and those that dont participate in any sport/dont do anything that requires then to exert themselves physically
the athletes(as i will refer to people who regularly participate in sports) seem to be able to think clearly, they want to be(and are capable of) interpreting why something works, they want to know that it works, and also WHY it works,
the second group, those that participate in very little to no physical activity, seem to be the type of people who are comptent with merely knowing that something works, they dont want to find out why, they arent curious

blocking any other, more overbearing, factors, the first group(athletes) usually doesnt get as high of marks, on paper they dont seem as smart, they usually arent on the honor roll, they are blown off as "normal" kids, it seems that the concentration they learn in sports is carried over to school
the second group seems to be all over the map (mark-wise), you get all types of kids, the smarter (mark-wise) kids (not me) seem to simply memorize all of the concepts that they are taught, yet when they need help, they fall back to kids with lower marks, who are capable of understanding what is going on

this would therefore support what was said in the quote, sports and the extra blood flow to the brain it produces would help everyone with the ability to think and act clearer

from what i have heard the european systems of education seem to be better, because they teach children to think and not simply do

and what is this "thinkfast" game that gabriel and eric are talking about>?

ps. all of this is from a kid educated in canada, so it all needs to be taken with a certain a certain phrase in mind (that phrase being "hes probably wrong") :rcard

pps. gabriel, thanks for bringing all these interesting topics to our attention

I've known a lot of "dumb jocks" in my time, so I don't buy your argument completely. I do agree about how our school system (in Canada, at least) tends to focus on facts and doesn't do much to motivate individual thought. I consider myself very fortunate to have parents that provided this motivation outside of school, and then to have teachers in school which recognized it and helped nurture it. I was definitely not a jock, however, and after 6 months of freediving and improved diet I feel physically better and more energetic, but I can't honestly say that I have noticed any change in analytical ability (either in my hobbies or at work).

My girlfriend thinks i´m nuts for freediving. "what´s the purpose of drowning yourself in a freezing pool for 5 minutes". i always answer "darling, i don´t know, it just makes me feel better". somehow this breathholding stuff enhances your mental fuctions, you become more of a clear-thinker and ideas begin to pop up really easy. Being a doctor most of my colleagues think i am killing brain cells every time i free dive, my personal opinion is that i am simply training them to be more efficient!

further educational / media banter

apologies in advance for the length.

Stumbling through Aviation Week and Space Technology (06May2002 p. 61-2 "System Strategy Needed To Build Next Aero Workforce") I found the following which seems to follow the spirit of the tread from yet another angle.

In his role as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautic's (AIAA's) Chairman of the 2002 World Space Congress Workforce and Education Workshop, Richard Stephens and a team of colaborators from a wide spectrum of interested parties have identified factors that translate to a future shortage of technical workers; a change in childhood development, which has a dramatic impact on the development of critical thinking skills, and the influency of todays mass media on young people.


"
...Perhaps the most startling discovery by the AIAA colaboration has been in the area of early childhood learning and its unquestionable impact. "our research shows a definite correlation between media and the brain development of children", Said Alberto Gedissman, a physician and member of the committee on Public Education for the American academy of Pediatrics.

"For example, kids exposed to 'light screens'- television, computers and videoscreens for extended periods at an early age do not develop sensory pathways that enable imagination and creativity. In fact, these children are considered sensory deprived."

"A colleague wrote about an astronaut who visited an impoverished school district, wearing his flight suit and being a role model image," said Michael Mendizza, a researcher for Touch the Future, a non-profit learning design center in northern California. "That would have been a fairly impressive thing when I was growing up, but these kids couldn't care less. They'd been so saturated with intense stimulation by television, commercials and movies that you'd have to go way beyond 'Star Trek" to compete for a young person's fantasy. These kids, through TV, have alreadt been to the moon and back 400 times. You'd have to teleport them now to impress them"

Motivating the next generation of aerospace professionals pales when compared with the challenge possed by "brain wiring" differences though. (...children's brains are literally being wired differently by their "light screen"- dominated environment today... children overexposed to TV and computers are not developing the critical thinking skills required to design future aircraft). The problem of 'endangered minds' and the near collapse of our educational system - is literally a diminishing capacity for abstraction among the general population. Because we are so saturated with data, the ability to think deeply about content, then abstract from that (to obtain) meaning and consequenses -to connect the dots- is diminishing. Children can still memorize quite readily because that's a basic neurological process. But they can't come up with meaning. If they have to think, they have a real difficult time imagining - and I emphasize that word 'imagining' - whats being asked of them. Developmentally, this diminishing capacity for authentic creativity is linked to a lack of imagination.

Playing and being exposed to language via spoken descriptions and the written word are key to development. In 1950, the average 14 year old had a speaking vocabulary of 25,000 words. Today, the average is 10,000 words. Before the 1950's, childhood had a rich, descriptive narrative as it's primary environment - storytelling and radio. Descriptive words were used, and they demanded a child create a corresponding internal mental image of what those words meant. Now, when we see (the movie) 'Star Wars' we all see Yoda the same; we all have the same image. There's no real imagination involved in seeing Yoda. Creating a mental image of that creature -if we hadn't seen him- requires a completely different set of brain functions than just calling up a concrete image of what we've seen previously.

This is one of the fundamental challenges...because the media presents concrete images, the use of descriptive language is undermined. This is related to how many hours young children are watching television, playing Nintendo and doing things on computers. It's infinitly more difficult for the brain to process and derive meaning from symbolic and metaphoric language than it is to look at a picture.....
"

cheers
Darryl

Well said Darryl. I wrote a research paper on this topic a few years back, and the statistics are very depressing. Luckily there are kids like Vince (thin air) out there who will carry the torch, unlike the masses of ADHD children pumped full of a drug that isn't understood by the inventors, let alone the parents (Ritalin).
Cheers,
Erik Y.
kill your TV:ban

thanks Darryl for that interesting arcticle, makes me happy i dont watch that much tv(heck we only got cable last year)

but now im curious, if watching tv can physically change you(the wiring in your brain), couldnt freediving(ok, lots of freediving) also change the wiring of the brain, except for the better>?

erik, thanks for the kind words

does anybody know of the "thinkfast" game that eric f. and gabriel are talking about>?

thanks

Thinkfast...

I have no personal experience with the software but it can be found here...

http://www.brain.com/

This is what it says about it...

ThinkFAST™ is an interactive software package that puts a complete peak performance training program at your fingertips! First it exercises your brain to promote mental fitness. Then it analyzes your performance in a number of key areas and tells you which of your cognitive mechanisms are functioning well and which ones could use a little help. It suggests strategies to help improve your performance, then it tracks your progress. The harder you push, the more ThinkFAST challenges you.

Thinkfast...

Guess I should add that it says it only runs on Windows 95 & 98 and that it will not run on Windows 2000 or XP. Guess I won't be looking at it anytime soon.

neuroplasticity

Vincent.

All things that we do changes our nervous system (ie: destroying old synapses, building new connections, strengthening others) The nerve does not have the ability to make a value judgement: "desireable vs undesireable changes" have no meaning, only use. We often aquire undesireable movement patterns unwittingly...its usually only when we are injured and can no longer compensate for our imbalances or inefficiencies that we notice. This is based on use.

The deleterious effects of media...making us sensory deprived is certainly not a factor when in the outdoors, experiencing risk, being open to the world and changing with it.


Our form dictates our function. Our function dictates our future form. (there is no one time...from a nervous system standpoint at the very least...that we are ever the same...structurally, physiologically...from one moment to the next) Isn't it wonderful?

Darryl

Hi,
I do not know this Think FAST game, but other game , that can make you think fast is chess, especially blitz, so what I want to ask: am I only chess enthusiast here?

I am not sure if it is connected with training statics, but I am playing better then before I started freediving (but still not good enoug )

Petr

I spik ded gud ingreesh

This ThinkFast programme sounds like fun. I must look out for it. I quite enjoy doing IQ tests, but it sounds like this programme may be superior.

Something that made me smile in all this talk of good/bad written English - a certain other freedive website has a guestbook, where many of the postings are riddled with bad spelling, grammar and syntax. So this website must be a more cerebral place - hence why we are attracted back to it?

The bad side?

Hi all,
This thread allways called my attention because I have the same thougths. But on this days I have been reading about Intermittent hypoxia. On my search I found this article:"Physiological and pathophysiological responses to intermittent hypoxia" in the Journal of Applied Physiology 2001(90):1593
It's mainly about the adaptative changes that occur in response to high altitude. "Is well known that we adapt to counter the chronic effects of hypoxia in ways highly beneficial for maximizing the efficient use of oxygen for metabolic demand".
The author agree that the functional benefits of repetitive hypoxia for both its therapeutic value in patients and performance in athletes, but the syndromes of sleep obstructive apnea and the apnea of prematurity suggests that may be long-term adverse consecuences of chronic cyclical hypoxia, and that ultimately the chronicity of intermittent hypoxia may determine wheter the response crosses the threshold from having protective value to pathology.
The beneficial effects are many:

• Protection in surviving lethal hypoxia
• Improve exercise performance and exercise time
• Enhanced expression of stress proteins and antioxidants systems
• Antiarrhytmic efect in acute myocardial ischemia
• Prevent atherosclerosis
• Stimulus for erythropoietin production
• Increase in the hypoxic ventilatory response

But chronic inttermitent hypoxia have some bad effects:

• Increase the blood pressure response to hypoxia
• Increases right ventricular heart mass
• neurocognitive deficits
• Production of reactive free radicals (peroxynitrate) that induce brain damage

The "bad" effects are derived from pathological situations of inttermitent hypoxia, like Obstructive Sleep Apnea where the desaturation at sleep is severe (50%), but she mention an study in climbers at high altitude that exhibit alterations in neuropsychological and cognitive functions that can persist after long periods of time after they return to sea level. And there are studies where brief exposure to hypoxia alter learning in animal models (monkeys).
My personal view is that the grade of desaturation and the time can have a "bad" effect, and that can be the difference between beneficial and pathological effects.
What do you think?

I am up to 3:06 in static apnea. A great accomplishment for me, anyway. I have a friend who does not believe that the brain can last longer than 4 minutes without oxygen. He firmly believes that cellular death starts to occur in this time. I have tried to reason with him, saying "its like saying that each person can only do 20 pushups..or each man can run only 2 miles.." He is an informed health nut, and I have no proof to back me up. Any good reading on this?

Well, you can tell your "health nut" that apnea is not the same as anoxia (total absence of oxygen); apnea means stop breathing but just externally the real respiration is in our cells (the mitochondria) and during apnea our cell respiration is still working.
Tell him that a lot of people is beyond 4 minutes of apnea (By the way that 4 minutes are not the limit of anoxia, there are reports of people that have been underwater, in cold waters, for 17 minutes and after a proper reanimation don't get brain damage), like Stepanek (8:06), Nitsch (8:11), Fattah, Maier and close to me, my brother (7:42) and no one have evidence of brain damage, in fact some are very inteligent persons. The "trick" is to use the low amount of oxygen, that means that the apneist have to low down his metabolism and use just the necessary amount of oxygen to keep his cells alive. The yogis also practice apnea(not for competition, of course) without evidence of brain damage. To simplificate, when you are doing apnea your cell are still breathing and taking oxygen from all the other sources different from the one that comes from the lungs.
My question in the previous reply are what are the long term consecuences of hypoxia.
Hope you can take out your friend from his misconceptions

good explaination fpernett
do you mind if i try another way>?

TMcKee, explain it to your friend like this...

my lung capacity (what i exhale, none of that residual stuff- for the simple reason that i havent figured it out)is 4.5 liters
now, for me a good hold (static) is 4:30 - 4:45 (i can do longer, but i risk samba)
next, with the packing that i do for my static my lung volume is 5L (plus residual)

so, i have 5L of air available for 4:30 thats a breathing rate of 1.11Liters per minute

just explain it like that, he might understand, he might not

ps. the 4 minute rule only starts after you black out...(ie. when there is not enough O2 to remain concious

My explanation

Ask your friend the following question:

- At what SaO2 level do you think that brain damage begins?
- (he will answer xx)

Then ask,
- In an good breath-holder, how long do you think they would have to hold their breath to reach that SaO2 xx (whatever number he said)
(he will answer xx minutes)

Then reply,
- Did you know that in fact studies have been done, and it actually takes XX minutes to reach that saturation?

Where in your head, you use the following table
Time SaO2
0 min = 98%
1 min = 98%
2 min = 98%
3 min = 97%
4 min = 95%
5 min = 82%
6 min = 73%
7 min = 50%
8 min = 25%

(just find your friend's response to the SaO2 and use the table -- he should reply about 80% because most doctors get worried around SaO2 = 80%)

These are true numbers.


Eric Fattah
BC, Canada

eric,
from these numbers, can we draw a conclusion that most people should be able to hold their breath for 2-3 min. since the SaO2 only changes by 1% (this is assuming that they keep themselves nice and relaxed)
is it also reasonable to assume that getting past 3:30 - 4 minutes is hard because past that time the SaO2 drops dramatically

thanks,

I had to go to an inservice today about brain research and education put on by Eric Jensen.

During one of the breaks I got to go up and talk to him about this topic. To my pleasent surprise he had actually heard about it and didn't think that I was a total nut case.

He cited Win Wenger's and Dr. Yashiro's work in the area. He also stated that two of his freinds swore by it. I guess that one had even done research into hyperbaric oxygen treatments and its effect on the brain.

He said that he liked to surf to clear his head and thought that the extra 02 that your body pumps through exercise had many positive effects on the brain.

The whole day turned out to be far more interesting that I had first invisioned.

THe people that I work with are always amazed at what topics I can relate back to diving.

Jon

Eric,

Do you by any chance have similar figures showing oxygen saturation changing over an exhale static, or a negative?

Hello to everyone,by activating this thread is there any new study about the hazards of apnea at last years.
A friend of mine who is a really serious spearfisher,have heard about an research on Italian spearfishers or freedivers,that there is a risk at the elderly ages a neurologic disorder that goes with syncopes(Maybe Alzheimer??). Did anyone in the forum heard anything about this study??