Science Authors

"I'd just recovered from pneumonia, which I'd also had the year before and the year before that. I was... wheezing, working, and eating... in a rut—physically, mentally [etc.]"

"I... signed up for an introductory course in breathing to learn... Sudarshan Kriya."

"[T]he voice of a man... flowed from the speakers... too melodious to sound natural... instructed me to inhale slowly through our noses, then exhale slowly. To focus on our breath."

"I read through reams of literature on the subject. ...The problem was, the sources were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old."

"A group of scientists, acoustic engineers and free divers have... the goal of trying to crack the sperm whale communication code in the next 2 years. ...We're going to use and AI algorithms... We're already doing this with mice... bats..."

"[F]or the first time... in human history we have the technology and... methods to... understand these animals and crack into their code..."

"It's going to a lot harder to kill an animal that's able to speak its name."

"In the next 10 years the U.S. ...is going to spend $100 million looking for signs of intelligent non-human life in the skies. But there's already intelligent non-human life... on our planet deep beneath the sea. It's been trying to reach out to us for thousands of years... [W]e should start talking back."

"[I]f we're able to understand just the rudiments of this communication, we may be able to save them. ...70% of the population is gone, and it's declining very quickly."

"Seven books of the Chinese Tao dating... to around 400BCE focused entirely on breathing... Even earlier, Hindus considered breath and spirit the same thing, and described elaborate practices... to balance breathing and preserve... mental and physical health. ...Buddhists ...use breathing ...to lengthen their lives [and] reach higher planes of consciousness. Breathing... for all... these cultures, was powerful medicine."

"[M]y doctor... told me, "A breathing class could help." ...strengthen my failing lungs, calm my frazzled mind, maybe give me perspective."

"Japan and Iceland... want to keep hunting sperm whales, and are petitioning to do that... [I]f we're able to prove their intelligence and their capacity for communication we might be able to establish them some... rights."

"[T]he lowest recorded heart rate [of a free diver]... was 7 beats per minute... about 1/2 of someone in a ..."

"The animals are usually very wary of scuba but... they saw something similar to themselves. ...[W]hales also have mammalian dive reflexes. That's how they're able to dive down to 8,000 feet for 90 minutes..."

"[T]he divers were able to commune with these animals for hours... and get footage that no one else has ever gotten."

"[A]fter around 30 feet... the water stops buoying you... and starts dragging you down to the sea floor. ...[T]he deeper ...the more your body changes. ...Your organs allow for the free flow of fluids so they don't collapse. Your brain waves slow down. Your heart rate will slow to about 1/3 its resting rate."

"So for the past 50 years we've been... studying these animals from the deck of a boat. Now this is very limiting. You can't see... you... have to put... s off the deck... But... they've found... that... sperm whales have dialects... they can shoot this click communication in focused sound beams to other whales across great distances... [T]hese sperm whales can cram 1600 micro-clicks into a single second... and move discreet frequencies around..."

"But they could not crack the communication code. To do that you have to get below the surface. You have to see these animals... to gauge their behavior."

"The whales welcomed them into their pods, started shooting them with echolocation to figure out what they were, and then started shooting them with... communication clicks. ...[T]his lasted for a series of days ..."

"[A] few years ago a French researcher and a Belgian freediver... thought "What if we try freediving with whales? Maybe we could get close enough... and start communicating...""

"He had a dolphin telephone... and he would listen in as these dolphins would have these very complex conversations..."

"He... had dolphin English language immersion workshops... where... an intern [would] grant dolphins sexual favors if they learned English words, and this... worked."

"I looked for... verification... recent research in ... but found next to nothing... breathing technique wasn't important. ...Pulmonologists work mainly on ...maladies of the lungs ...collapse, cancer, emphysema."

"Back in the 60s... John Lilly had a lab... dedicated to solving the dolphin communication problem..."

"You can overbreath. When people at a gym or... jogging... [through heavy panting] you're offloading... too much CO2. You're causing constriction in your circulation. ...If you were to breath 30 deep breaths, you'll feel some tingling in your head... maybe your fingertips... your toes will get cool. That's not from an increase in oxygen, it's the opposite... a decrease in circulation."

"Lilly... wanted to... figure out the communication code. He said these animals are by far the most intelligent... on the planet. They have a form of communication that is far more sophisticated than ours. But you can't quite put a 60 foot long whale into a lab."

"The sperm whale's brain is about 6 times the size of ours... They've had it for 15 million year longer... We've had our current size brain around 200,000 years."

"[T]hese clicks are so loud you can actually feel them in your body. Your body starts heating up after a few minutes."

"I swam with these animals about 4 years ago. Some friends and I had heard that off the coast of Sri Lanka these huge congregations of s would gather in March and April."

"If you compare the ocean to the human body... current exploration... is equivalent to snapping a photograph of a finger..."

"These animals came up to us, welcomed us into their pods and started showering us with these clicks."

"[B]est of all, divers will tell you, "It's open to everyone.""

"Scientists call it the mammalian dive reflex or...the Master Switch of Life, and they've been researching it for... fifty years. ...[C]oined by Per Scholander ...it refers to variety of physiological reflexes in the brain, lungs, heart [etc.] that are triggered the second we put our face in the water. The deeper... the more pronounced... Ancient cultures... employed it... to harvest sponges, pearls, coral and food hudreds of feet below the surface of the ocean..."

"I found out later that these clicks are actually used for communication. These animals also use them to see in the deep ocean. ...It's a form of called echolocation."

"Other than ... freediving is the most dangerous adventure sport in the world."

"I watch several more competitors... Many can't make it... They resurface with blood running... from their noses, unconscious, or in cardiac arrest. ...And somehow, this sport is legal."

"During the three minutes beneath the surface... the body bears only a passing resemblance to its terrestrial form and function. The ocean changes us physically and psychically."

"[T]here is no oxygen tank at the end of the rope, and if there had been... their lungs would have exploded... and their blood would have bubbled with nitrogen before they reached the surface. ...The human body can withstand the pressures of a fast three-hundred-foot... ascent only in its natural state. Some humans handle it better than others."

"The ocean is the last truly quiet place left on Earth."

"These more philosophical freedivers get... the same look one sees in the eyes of Buddhist monks or emergency room patients who have died and then been resuscitated... who have made it over to the other side."

"We're born of the ocean. ...At the fifth week of a fetus's development, its heart has two chambers, a characteristic shared by fish."

"[I]n many ways, rocks at the bottom of the deep sea, buried under a mile of Earth’s crust, or covered in bird crap on aren’t inanimate objects at all. They are undulating, "breathing" systems crammed with organisms so tiny and metabolizing so slowly that nobody ever noticed. Most researchers never bothered. Seeking out extreme life requires traveling to some of Earth’s most far-flung and miserable environments. Only a handful of microbiologists and geologists have had the will, fortitude, and resources to endure weeks in the triple-digit heat within African mines, or months in the frozen expanses of Antarctica, or years sifting through the polluted oil fields of to find answers."

"They're able to see better with sounds than we are able to see with our eyes."

"Inside of these clicks is encoded information... a secret language..."

"Human blood has a chemical composition startingly similar to seawater."

"[Y]our body wants to be in balance... the right amount of CO2 and oxygen for optimum delivery, and that's what the nose helps you to do."

"At sixty feet... The heart beats at half its normal rate. Blood starts rushing... toward the more critical... core. ...The senses numb, the synapses slow. The brain enters a heavily meditative state."

"At three hundred feet... pressure... is ten times that at the surface. ...The organs collapse. The heart beats at a quarter of its normal rate, slower than... in a . Senses disappear. The brain enters a dream state."

"[T]he more you focus in on these clicks, the tinier... they get, [growing] into more complex structures. ...[O]ther ns such as dolphins and orcas also use these. It's this secret language... discrete codes... down to the millisecond."

"An infant will reflexively breaststroke when placed underwater and comfortably hold his breath... longer than many adults."