Saturday, May 03, 2008

Glossopharyngeal Insufflation i.e. Lung Packing

The above has to be one of the stranger blog titles you'll see today. In lay-lay (sic) persons terms, glossopharyngeal insufflation refers to the practice of learning to hold one's breath for a very, very long time.

This has been a subject that has been of interest to me ever since I heard that to qualify as a Navy Seal, one must swim underwater for 50 meters (that's been a goal of mine for some time, but to now, I've never gotten much past 35 meters).

In a post dated, May 1, 2008, Time.com has published an article about how David Blaine, the performance artist, held his breath on the Oprah Show (those names are two more firsts for this blog) for seventeen minutes! I figured it was all just a fake stunt, but I may have been mistaken. The article discusses how the body processes and prioritizes the use of oxygen and how the brain can help or hinder the body's natural abilities. Some interesting stuff. I suggest the read.

3 comments:

  1. splash dog,
    he held it for 17minutes after breathing pure oxygen, the world record for normal air is only half of that

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  2. Very interesting post, although incomplete as I was looking to find out exactly what G.I. is (i.e. the proceedure).
    BTW - the use of the word "sic" is unnecessary as used above. You do not use it when you are writing as yourself, that is, wrting from your own perspective using your "voice". It is used when quoting other sources so as to indicate you are attributing the spelling, verbage, etc. exactly as the original source did. For example, if I were to quote your text, "In lay-lay persons terms", I would use the word to indicate that "lay-lay" is directly quoted and not something that I, the author of the new article, have used to somehow slight you.

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  3. This has a little more info on this, sorta, you have to pick through it; http://jap.physiology.org/content/103/3/823.full but again, I found this misleading, believing you were discussing what GI is and how to do it. And like the anonymous person said, he had pure oxygen. Without pure oxygen he couldn't beat the other record that's without pure oxygen which is just over 8 minutes.
    ~Clara

    ReplyDelete

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