Book Review as posted in the Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine: James Nestor's Breath is, in itself a breath of fresh air.

James Nestor wants you to shut up...in a nice way

 

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art 

By James Nestor

Riverhead Books, 2020

Hardcover, 304 Pages

ISBN-10: 0735213615

ISBN-13: 978-0735213616

List: $28.00 Amazon: $16.80

 

By Richard Murphy 

 

An old joke has it that an elderly man was asked his secret to long life and replied, "First thing I did was inhale, second exhale, it has been inhale, exhale ever since.  Nothing to it."

 

It turns out, it's not that simple, and odds are, we are all doing it wrong.  A reaction might be ”what do you mean?  I haven't suffocated."  True enough, but our mouths and noses are a mess because we don't get it right.

 

James Nestor was going through a bad patch of subpar health.  His doctor suggested a breathing class of a technique called Sudarshan Kriya might help his failing lungs and he duly showed up for his first session.  It did not look promising.  He was unimpressed by the decrepit house the lesson was taking place in.  Fellow students seemed a motley lot and the instructor did not excite confidence.

 

The class did not start off with a bang.  He was instructed by an odd voice from a cassette to breath in and out through the nose, slowly, focusing on the breath.

 

As the evening continued, he was less and less feeling it.  Good manners and free admission kept him there.

 

His grudging tenacity paid off.  Nestor did not notice a transformation or change but it happened, “I never felt myself relax or the swarm of nagging thoughts leave my head. But it was as if I'd been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else.  It happened in an instant."

 

He noted some physical changes and had an even better feeling of well-being the next day.  Wanting to learn more led to a quest that would last several years.  The book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art would be the result.

 

Breath is his hunt for what has happened to us over time such that as a species we are having trouble with breathing and maladies associated with it.

 

The author introduces us to a "rogue group" of explorers he calls "pulmonauts” who have had some of the same questions he had.  Many early members of that tribe were not scientists, but tinkerers "who stumbled on the powers of breathing because nothing else could help them."

 

There were searchers among the ancients but, for us, it started in the Nineteenth Century.  George Catlin, the most famous artist of the West, was one of the first.  A lawyer, then a portraitist in failing health, he left it all to live among and paint the Lakota Sioux.  That is what he is most famous for.  

 

What he found was a people in excellent health who knew how to breathe.  Without dentists, he reported their teeth "as regular as the keys of a piano."  Mothers would train infants to grow up breathing through the nose.

 

Catlin would bind his own mouth shut so that he would sleep with it closed as did the indigenes.  Restoring health, he lived to a more advanced age than average Americans of the time.  

 

Another "pulmonaut" was Carl Stough, who, according to Nestor, was somewhat a man of mystery as he left little record.  In his time, however, he had a big following.  From Opera singers to dying emphysemics, thousands found him.  His key to breathing well: "the transformative power of full exhalation."  He figured out, for example, emphysema patients suffered not because they could not get air into the lungs, but because they could not get enough stale air out.

 

There are others who have led the way.  Konstantin Buteyko was an advocate of breathing less to get more.  Czech runner, Emil Zátopek won Olympic gold with a similar technique.  Wim Hof seems more than a little eccentric, but no matter.  All of Nestor's subjects are interesting and people to learn from.

 

The author himself was his own subject of exploration, taking up "freediving."  Freediving does not take place at an Olympic pool where they don't charge admission, though it originated in Greece.  It was there that he explored the "ancient practice of diving hundreds of feet below the water's surface on a single breath of air."  This was also the subject of another book he wrote.

 

Being successful in going deep might make one think his troubles were over, but there was so much research to be done and nothing could stop him, no matter how much he had to suffer for science.

 

In the first chapter, James reveals the disaster area that was his nose (It was disgusting), and will embark on a project that seems destined to make it worse.  He, with fellow pulmonaut Anders Olsson, will have their noses stopped up to spend 10 days mouth breathing for science.

 

Olsson seems even more of a monomaniac than the author.  He feared his father's fate, wished to avoid it, and started his crusade. 

 

A prosperous Swedish businessman, Olsson got a divorce, sold off his company and cars and large house, and moved to smaller digs.  He read everything and talked to scientists, surgeons, and anyone worth talking to about  breathing.

 

When the noses were opened, it must have seemed anticlimactic that just about every vital sign and metric had gotten worse.  The second part of the test, naturally enough, was shutting off the mouth and only breathing through the nose.  The improvement post-experiment was also not unexpected.

 

So, just don't breathe through the mouth.  Well, yes, but it is not that simple, as habits of a lifetime and especially, their effects are not easily reversed.  But, some can be cured and some ameliorated.  It is not easy, and seems kind of weird, but there are methods.

 

One of the strangest is proposed by the dentist and pulmonaut, Mark Burhenne.  Dr. Mark asserts that mouth breathing contributes to periodontal disease, bad breath and "was the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene."  I feel less guilty about all those M&Ms I ate as a child.

 

What's his cure?  Before you go to bed, you don't have to bind your mouth like Catlin.  Instead, tape it shut.  Not sensing a mass conversion among readers, but there are results.

 

A five-year-old was cured of ADHD.  The vital gas Nitric Oxide is increased.  The author claims it ended his sleep apnea and snoring.

 

There is another problem that modern man and woman suffer from, small mouths.  It was noticed to happen in the mid 1800s, and leads to problems in eating, speaking and breathing as well as crooked teeth and overbite.  The cure: expand the mouth.

 

This is done by putting a device that expands the mouth into the mouth.  It is a plastic retainer and dowel screw that forces the upper palate to grow outward

 

Nestor submitted to wearing a similar contraption at night.  Around a year later, his small mouth had grown appreciably in size.  It works because the affected bones in the mouth, unlike others, can actually grow into one's seventies.  The author, due to the year of suffering, is breathing better, but at the bottom of the page he tells us it's all unnecessary.  One can get the same benefits by chewing gum a couple of hours a day.

 

Hard chewing is missing from the soft foods we eat and that contributes to diminutive mouths.  Humans are supposed to chew.  He doesn't recommend the bubble gum I got with baseball cards as a kid.  Rather, he suggests a sugarless Turkish gum.  No flavor, but not unpleasant.  You too can improve the structure of your mouth and breathe better.

 

One aspect of breathing that was a surprise is that carbon dioxide is as important as oxygen.  One would not think so, after all, scuba divers do not go under with carbon dioxide tanks.  Nestor claims we always have enough oxygen, even when we are short of breath.  It's the CO2 we need more of.  That gas has many functions in the circulation of blood, and when we lose weight, it is mostly exhaling the end product of fat as Carbon Dioxide.  Who knew?

 

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is a book that investigates many facets of the human respiratory system and few modern men and women are without problems.  James Nestor looks at more issues than are covered in this review and prescribes solutions for many.

 

In the first chapter, one of his interviewees asks "Why would we evolve to make ourselves sick?"  It is a flip answer, but fair enough to say, because we can.  We like our soft and rich foods.  Few would choose to live like the Sioux, maybe not even contemporary Sioux. 

 

The book is an adventure and Nestor writes well.  With no medical credentials, I cannot judge the science of Breath.  Still, the author is persuasive and my recommendation is personal.  Readers can evaluate Breath to their own judgement.  

 

Review of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence By Michael Pollan

Below is my review of Michael Pollan's book as submitted to the editor for the April, 2019 issue of The Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine.

Mind Blowing

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence

By Michael Pollan

Penguin Press, 2018

By Richard Morchoe

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan was not what someone of my generation might have expected.  Baby boomers would remember the subject by conjuring up pictures in their minds of news reports from Woodstock and people in tie dyed tee shirts as well as friends telling of their “Trips.”  That is, of course, if they were not doing it themselves.

As the 60s became the 70s, the LSD culture that had been part of hippiedom seemed to wane.  True, there may have been a persistence invisible to the general society, but few would have known.

Is Mr. Pollan writing about a resurgence of the counterculture?  Not at all.  Has he taken notice of the “Microdosing” of psychedelics that is the rage in Silicon Valley among techies?  Yes, but only in passing.

How to Change Your Mind is a history of all that has happened in the development of substances that do change the mind, but it is much more than that.  It is also an exploration of what the drugs can and are doing and it is personal.

The author and I are baby boomers with him being five years my junior.  This leads me to wonder about his motivation.  When the “Summer of Love” happened in 1967, he can’t have known anyone who had “dropped acid” at the time.  Scott MacKenzie’s lyrics beginning with “If you’re going to San Francisco” would have had little meaning to him as he would not have known someone wearing “flowers in their hair.”

Then again, in his youth, the man was braver than I.  No matter who was doing what around me, your reviewer never touched the stuff while Pollan ate magic mushrooms with his future wife.

If you were looking for someone to tell us where the world now stands with mind altering substances and how we got here, you could do worse than Michael Pollan.

Pollan is the author of several books, probably best known for the Omnivore’s Dilemma, an engaging discussion of where our food comes from and how it affects us.  The book was controversial as he is not for many of the practices of industrial agriculture.

Pollan’s attitude toward food is popular enough with many and thus is hardly out of the mainstream.  At this point in time, psychedelics are nowhere near that, yet the subject matter is not really a departure for someone with as inquisitive a mind.  Who knows, it may have been unanswered questions from his experiments with his partner that spurred his interest, or not.

Albert Hofmann did not invent psychedelics, indigenous people of the Americas had been doing mushrooms for centuries.  He did discover what we know as LSD.  Hofmann himself may not have set out to get high, but he did.

The Swiss research chemist partook of the molecule in 1943.  His experience, not completely pleasant, convinced him that the substance would be of no little value to psychiatry.  Hofmann, according to Pollan, did not foresee that it would also become a “pleasure drug.”  Yet he understood it as a response to a spiritually impoverished society needing a “spiritual balm.” He was not a soulless scientist.

LSD would be studied seriously in the academic and medical world along with mushrooms and derivatives.   The famous novelist, Aldous Huxley would write of his 1953 experience with Mescaline in his book The Doors of Perception.

Interestingly, Bill Wilson, also known as Bill W, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous was interested in psychedelics as possibly part of the program due to its spiritual aspects.

Of course, Timothy Leary was inevitable and LSD, Mescaline, Psilocybin et al went out into the world.  The world got to see it all through the eyes of the media and pushback occurred such that the substances would become scheduled by the government.

The hibernation appears to be over and thus Mr. Pollan’s book.  He documents where the study and experimentation is now headed.  The author personally became part of his research.  He does also admit to some, not demons, but questions maybe and “there are moments when curiosity gets the better of fear.”

Participation would be necessary as all you have are the subjective experiences of study volunteers, as well documented as they may be.

Taking the substances without some guidance and in the wrong environment, what is referred to as “set and setting,” could be a problem.  A guide is necessary as the result could be a “bad trip” with the wrong person or none at all.  Pollan documented his search for a discerning chaperone.

The author would use LSD, Psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT (found on a psychoactive toad species and is obscure, a tribute to Pollan’s dedication and daring that he would do it).  The effects on him would vary and be a learning experience.

When he was taking LSD, he asked the woman guiding him if they could change the music that accompanied the session.  Music was part of each experience and had run to New Age and Pollan found it bland.  He and the guide agreed on a Bach unaccompanied cello suite.  Michael described it as mournful and it is somber. 

The author began his recounting of the “trip” by writing, “Never before has a piece of music pierced me as deeply as this one did now” and went on to wax eloquent on what it evoked.  One might wonder how valid it all was and they would not be alone.  In a later recollection, he would think, “Fool, you were on drugs.” 

Reflecting on it further led him to write “everything I experienced, I experienced…” and in a session with the guide, was able to realize what he could take from it.

After the voyages to inner space, How to Change Your Mind explores what psychedelics can do for the greater world in the chapter, “Trip Treatment.”  It begins with the story of the latter days of Patrick Mettes.  Patrick would participate in a trial with

psilocybin at N.Y.U.  As Pollan puts it, it “would change his death.”

Mettes had a virulent cancer and, according to Michael, “was buckling under the weight” of the chemo and “the dawning realization that he might not survive.”  Patrick’s end of life journey is lovely to read.

The rest of Trip Treatment speaks to research in addiction and depression and though there is promise, that is all there is at this point and much is to be done.  

So, should we all be thinking about the possibility of seeking a change of mind?  The last chapter has a debate about the purpose of it all.  We might applaud uses that lead to amelioration of suffering, but is that it?  Is the promise that all the researchers after Hofmann saw not to be realized?  Will we not see psychedelics be used, in the words of Bob Jesse, for “the betterment of well people?”

The whole experience did change Pollan’s mind.  He ends with, “Mysteries abide.  But this I can say with certainty: the mind is vaster, and the world ever so much more alive, than I knew when I began.”