When it first came out in 2020, James Nestor‘s book Breath -The New Science of a Lost Art shot to the New York Times Bestseller List.
Breath gives an overview of different breathing methods through study, self-exploration, and scientific testing. The journalist James Nestor travels the world to research the story about how diverse ancient and more contemporary breathing methods like Tibetan Summo, Buteyko, and Holotropic Breathing, for example, came into being and tests their efficacy.
The main emphasis of James Nestor‘s breath research lies on breathing through the nose rather than through the mouth. To that end, the author and the Swedish breath therapist Anders Olsson undergo a monitored breath experiment in Stockholm which is as revealing about how breathing chemistry works as it is entertaining. The book is also interesting for giving less well-known pioneers of breath teaching, for example, Carl Stough or Katharina Schroth, a platform.
Of all the books written on breathing, I can safely say that this is definitely the most entertaining one. To give you a taste, here is an excerpt from the opening chapter that describes the atmosphere predating our own and breathing as we know it:
„A while back, some 4 billion years ago, our earliest ancestors appeared on some rocks. We were small then, a microscopic ball of sludge. And we were hungry. We needed energy to live and proliferate. So we found a way to eat air.
The atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide then, not the best fuel, but it worked well enough. These early versions of us learned to take this gas in, break it down, and spit out what was left: oxygen. For the next billion years, the primordial goo kept doing this, eating more gas, making more sludge, and excreting more oxygen.
Then, around two and a half billion years ago, there was enough oxygen waste in the atmosphere that a scavenger ancestor emerged to make use of it. It learned to gulp in all that leftover oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide: the first cycle of aerobic life.
Oxygen, it turned out, produced 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide. Aerobic life forms used this boost to evolve, to leave the sludge-covered rocks behind and grow larger and more complex. They crawled up to land, dove deep into the sea, and flew into the air. They became plants, trees, birds, bees and the earliest mammals.
Mammals grew noses to warm and purify the air, throats to guide air into lungs, and a network of sacs that would remove oxygen from the atmosphere and transfer it into the blood. The aerobic cells that once clung to swampy rocks so many eons ago now made up the tissues in mammalian bodies. These cells took oxygen from our blood and returned carbon dioxide, which traveled back through the veins, through the lungs, and into the atmosphere: the process of breathing.
The ability to breathe so efficiently in a wide variety of ways – consciously and unconsciously; fast, slow, and not at all – allowed our mammal ancestors to catch prey, escape predators, and adapt to different environments.
It was all going so well until about 1.5 million years ago, when the pathways through which we took in and exhaled air began to shift and fissure. It was a shift that, much later in history, would affect the breathing of every person on Earth.“