Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

The nose is crucial because it clears air, heats it, and moistens it for easier absorption.

I’m hoping that I too can reverse whatever damage I’d done in the last ten days, and the past four decades. I’m hoping I can relearn to breathe the way my ancestors breathed. I suppose I’ll see soon enough. Tomorrow morning, the plugs come out.

could either be reduced or reversed simply by changing the way we inhale and exhale.

The phenomenon, called nasal cycles,

I did this two dozen times after each meal today, to heat up my body and aid my digestion.

Although his health was failing, Catlin yearned to be far away in nature, to capture rawer and more real depictions of humanity. He packed a gun, several canvases, a few paintbrushes, and headed west. Catlin would spend the next six years traveling thousands of miles throughout the Great Plains, covering more distance than Lewis and Clark to docume

No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes are, how skinny or young or wise we are—none of it will matter unless we’re breathing correctly.

These measurements, which are called the Frankfort plane and N-perpendicular, show the symmetry of each specimen, how well-proportioned the mouth was relative to the face, the nose to the palate, and, to a large extent, how well the people who owned these skulls might have breathed.

how each inhaled breath provides us with new energy and each exhale releases old, stale energy.

It involves placing an index finger over the left nostril and then inhaling and exhaling only through the right.