第一章

动物王国中呼吸最差的动物

病人于上午 9 点 32 分到达医院，面色苍白，精神萎靡，男性，中年，体重 175 磅。健谈、友善，但明显焦虑。 疼痛：无。 疲劳：有一点。 焦虑程度：中度。 对病情进展和未来症状的担忧：高。

病人说，他在现代郊区环境中长大，六个月时开始奶瓶喂养，断奶后吃罐装食品。由于这种软食缺乏咀嚼，导致牙弓和鼻窦腔的骨骼发育不良，导致慢性鼻塞。【译者注：咀嚼非常重要。】

到 15 岁时，他开始靠更软、高度加工的食物为生，主要包括白面包、加糖果汁、罐装蔬菜、牛排、Velveeta 三明治（grilled cheese sandwiches）、微波炉玉米饼、Hostess Sno Balls 【一种甜食】和 Reggie！ bars 【条状巧克力零食】。 他的口腔发育不全，无法容纳 32 颗恒牙； 门牙和犬齿生长得歪斜，需要拔牙、使用牙套、和头饰（headgear）才能矫正。 三年的牙齿矫正让他的小嘴变得更小，舌头也不再能完全贴合在牙齿之间。 当他把舌头伸出来时（他经常这样做），它的两侧出现了明显的印记，这是打鼾的先兆。

17 岁时，他拔掉了四颗（未长出来的）智齿，这进一步缩小了他的嘴的大小，同时增加了他患上慢性夜间窒息（称为睡眠呼吸暂停【sleep apnea】）的机会。 随着年龄增长到 20 多岁和 30 多岁，他的呼吸变得更加费力和不正常，呼吸道也变得更加阻塞。 他的脸继续垂直生长，导致眼睛下垂、脸颊松软、额头倾斜、和鼻子突出。

不幸的是，这张萎缩、发育不全的嘴巴、喉咙和头骨属于我。

我躺在斯坦福耳鼻喉头颈外科中心的检查椅上看着自己，审视自己。 在过去的几分钟里，鼻窦外科医生 Jayakar Nayak 医生一直小心翼翼地将内窥镜摄像头穿过我的右鼻腔。 摄像头已经深深地进入我的脑，以至于它从另一边出来，进入我的喉咙。

“说eeee，”他说。 纳亚克有一头光环，黑发，戴着方形眼镜，脚踩带衬垫的跑鞋，穿着白色外套。 但我不是在看他的衣服，也不是他的脸。 我戴着一副视频护目镜，可以实时直播我穿过连绵起伏的沙丘、沼泽沼泽和严重受损的鼻窦内的钟乳石的旅程。 当内窥镜进一步向下蠕动时，我尽量不咳嗽、不被憋死、或窒息。

“说 eeee，”纳亚克重复道。 我一边说着，一边看着我喉咙周围的软组织，粉红色、肉质、涂有粘液，像一朵定格动画的乔治亚·欧姬芙花（Georgia O'Keeffe flower）一样打开和关闭。

这不是一次愉快的经历。 25 个 sextillion 分子（即 250 个，后面有 20 个零）每分钟进行同样的航行 18 次，每天 25,000 次。 我来这里是为了观察、感受和了解这些空气应该从哪里进入我们的身体。 接下来的十天我要和我的鼻子说再见了。

在过去的一个世纪里，西医普遍认为鼻子或多或少是一个辅助器官。 我们的想法是，如果可以的话，我们应该用它吐气；但如果不能，也没有问题。 这就是嘴的用途（吐气）。

许多医生、研究人员和科学家仍然支持这一立场。 呼吸管、口呼吸和鼻呼吸都只是达到同一目的的手段。 美国国立卫生研究院有 27 个科室，专门研究肺科、眼科、皮肤科、耳科等。 鼻子和鼻窦都不在其中。

纳亚克认为这很荒谬。 他是斯坦福大学鼻学研究的负责人。 他领导着一家国际知名的实验室，完全致力于了解鼻子的潜力。 他发现人类头部内的沙丘、钟乳石和沼泽（ dunes, stalactites, and marshes）为身体协调了多种功能。 重要功能。 “那些结构在那里是有原因的！” 他早些时候告诉我。 纳亚克对鼻子有一种特殊的敬畏，他认为鼻子被极大地误解和低估。 这就是为什么他如此感兴趣，想看看在没有鼻子的情况下，身体会发生什么变化。 这就是我来到这里的原因。

从今天开始，我将在接下来的二十五万次呼吸中用硅胶塞堵住我的鼻孔，并用手术胶带将塞子固定住，以阻止哪怕是最微量的空气进出我的鼻子。 我将只用嘴呼吸，这是一个令人发指的实验，会让人筋疲力尽、痛苦不堪，但它的目的很明确。

当今百分之四十的人口患有慢性鼻塞，大约一半的人习惯用口呼吸，其中女性和儿童受影响最严重。 原因有很多：干燥的空气、压力、炎症、过敏、污染、药品。 但我很快就会了解到，大部分责任可以归咎于人类头骨前面不断缩小的空间。

当嘴巴长得不够宽时，上颚往往会上升而不是向外突出，形成所谓的 V 形或高拱形上颚。 向上生长会阻碍鼻腔的发育，使其缩小并破坏鼻子中脆弱的结构。 鼻腔空间缩小会导致阻塞并抑制气流。 总的来说，人类是地球上（鼻子）最堵塞的物种，这一点很可悲。

我应该知道这些。 在探查我的鼻腔之前，纳亚克对我的头部进行了 X 光检查，这为我口腔、鼻窦和上呼吸道的每个角落和缝隙提供了截面视图。

“你有一些……东西，”他说。 我不仅有V形上颚，而且由于鼻中隔“严重”偏斜而导致左鼻孔“严重”阻塞。 我的鼻窦也布满了称为大疱的畸形。 “非常罕见，”纳亚克说。 没有人愿意从医生那里听到这句话。

我的呼吸道非常混乱，纳亚克很惊讶我没有遭受更多我小时候就知道的感染和呼吸问题。 但他相当肯定我将来可能会出现某种程度的严重呼吸问题。

在接下来的十天强迫用口呼吸中，我将把自己置于一种粘液水晶球中，放大并加速对我的呼吸和健康的有害影响，随着我年龄的增长，这种情况会变得更糟。 我会让我的身体进入一种它已经知道的状态，一半的人口都知道的状态，只是将其倍增很多倍。

“好吧，稳住，”纳亚克说。 他抓住一根末端带有钢丝刷的钢针。 它的大小相当于睫毛膏刷。 我在想，他不会把那玩意放进我的鼻子里。 几秒钟后，他把它放进我的鼻子里。

我透过视频护目镜看到纳亚克将刷子调得更深。 他不断地滑动，直到刷子不再在我的鼻子上，不再在我的鼻毛周围玩耍，而是在我的头内几英寸深的地方摆动。 “稳住，稳住，”他说。

当鼻腔充血时，气流就会减少，细菌就会大量繁殖。 这些细菌会复制并导致感染、感冒和更多的充血。 堵塞会导致堵塞，这让我们别无选择，只能习惯性地用嘴呼吸。 没有人知道这种损害多久会发生。 没有人知道细菌在阻塞的鼻腔中积聚的速度有多快。 纳亚克需要对我的鼻腔深层组织进行培养才能找到答案。

当我看着他把刷子拧得更深，然后旋转它，撇去一层粘稠物时，我皱起了眉头。 鼻子上方的神经是用来感受空气的微妙流动和气温的轻微调节的，而不是感受钢刷。 尽管他在那里抹了麻醉剂，但我仍然能感觉到。 我的大脑很难确切地知道该做什么、如何反应。 这很难解释，但感觉就像有人在刺痛存在于我大脑之外某处的连体双胞胎。

“你从来没有想过你会用一生去做这些事情，”纳亚克笑着将刷子的带鲜血尖端放入试管中。 他会将我鼻窦中的 200,000 个细胞与十天后的另一个样本进行比较，以了解鼻塞如何影响细菌生长。 他摇晃试管，递给他的助手，并礼貌地要求我摘下视频护目镜，为他的下一个病人腾出空间。

2 号病人靠在窗户上，用手机拍照。 他今年 49 岁，晒得黝黑，白发，蓝眼睛，穿着一尘不染的米色牛仔裤和皮鞋，没穿袜子。 他的名字叫安德斯·奥尔森 (Anders Olsson)，从瑞典斯德哥尔摩飞了行5,000 英里来这里。 他和我一起花费了 5,000 多美元来参加这个实验。

几个月前，我在浏览奥尔森的网站后采访了他。 网站上有所有不稳定的危险信号：金发女郎在山顶上摆出英雄姿势的库存图片、霓虹灯颜色、疯狂使用感叹号和气泡字体（bubble font）。 但奥尔森并不是一个边缘人物。 他花了十年时间收集并进行认真的科学研究。 他写了几十篇文章，并自行出版了一本从亚原子层面解释呼吸的书，所有这些都附有数百项研究的注释。 他还成为斯堪的纳维亚半岛最受尊敬和最受欢迎的呼吸治疗师之一，通过健康呼吸的微妙力量帮助治愈了成千上万的患者。【译者注：https://www.consciousbreathing.com/blogs/articles/meet-anders-olsson】

当我在一次 Skype 对话中提到我将在实验期间用口呼吸十天时，他感到畏缩。 当我问他是否愿意加入时，他拒绝了。 “我不想，”他宣称。 “但我很好奇。”

现在，几个月后，奥尔森带着时差反应的身体，一屁股坐在检查椅上，戴上视频眼镜，用鼻子呼吸了最后一口气；在接下来的 240 小时，他只能用嘴呼吸。 在他旁边，纳亚克旋转不锈钢内窥镜，就像重金属鼓手处理鼓槌一样。 “好吧，把头向后仰，”纳亚克说。 纳亚克手腕一扭，脖子一扬，就深深地探入奥尔森的鼻子了。

实验分两个阶段进行。 第一阶段包括堵住鼻子并尝试过我们的日常生活。 我们会像往常一样吃饭、锻炼和睡觉，只是我们只用嘴呼吸。 在第二阶段，我们将像第一阶段一样吃、喝、锻炼和睡觉，但我们将改变路径并通过鼻子呼吸，并全天练习多种呼吸技巧。

在两个阶段之间，我们将返回斯坦福大学并重复我们刚刚进行的所有测试：血气、炎症标记物、激素水平、气味、鼻测量、肺功能等等。 纳亚克将比较数据集，看看当我们改变呼吸方式时，我们的大脑和身体发生了什么变化（如果有的话）。

当我告诉朋友们这个实验时，他们都倒吸一口冷气。 “别这么做！” 一些瑜伽爱好者警告说。 但大多数人只是耸耸肩。 “我已经十年没有用鼻子呼吸了，”一位一生中大部分时间都患有过敏症的朋友说。 其他人都说：有什么大不了的？ 呼吸就是呼吸。

是吗？ 奥尔森和我将在接下来的 20 天里寻找答案。

。 。 。

不久前，大约 40 亿年前，我们最早的祖先出现在一些岩石上。 那时我们还很小，是一个微小的污泥球。 我们很饿。 我们需要能量来生存和繁殖。 所以我们找到了一种吃空气（eat air）的方法。

当时的大气主要是二氧化碳，不是最好的燃料，但它的作用已经足够好了。 我们的这些早期版本学会了吸收这种气体，将其分解，然后吐出剩下的东西：氧气。 在接下来的十亿年里，原始粘液（the primordial goo）继续这样做，吃掉更多的气体，制造更多的污泥，并排出更多的氧气。

然后，大约二十五亿年前，大气中存在足够的氧气废物，食腐动物祖先出现了，可以利用它们。 它学会了吞下所有剩余的氧气并排出二氧化碳：有氧生命的第一个周期。

事实证明，氧气产生的能量是二氧化碳的 16 倍。 需氧生命形式利用这种推动力进化，将污泥覆盖的岩石抛在身后，并变得更大、更复杂。 它们爬上陆地，潜入大海，飞向空中。 它们变成了植物、树木、鸟类、蜜蜂和最早的哺乳动物。

哺乳动物长出了鼻子来加热和净化空气，长出了喉咙来引导空气进入肺部，还长出了一个囊网络，可以吸收大气中的氧气并将其转移到血液中。 亿万年前曾经附着在沼泽岩石上的需氧细胞现在构成了哺乳动物体内的组织。 这些细胞从我们的血液中吸收氧气并返回二氧化碳，二氧化碳通过静脉返回，通过肺部，进入大气：呼吸的全过程。

以多种方式有效呼吸的能力——有意识和无意识； 快、慢、屏住呼吸——让我们的哺乳动物祖先能够捕捉猎物、逃避捕食者并适应不同的环境。

一切都进展顺利，直到大约 150 万年前，我们吸入和呼出空气的通道开始发生变化和裂缝。 这一转变在很久以后的历史中影响了地球上每个人的呼吸。

我一生中的大部分时间都感觉到这些裂缝，很可能你也有过：鼻塞、打鼾、某种程度的喘息、哮喘、过敏、等等。 我一直认为它们是正常的人生的一部分。 我认识的几乎每个人都遇到过这样或那样的问题。

但我逐渐了解到这些问题并不是随机产生的。 有一些事情导致了他们。 答案可以在人类的共同特征中找到。

在斯坦福大学实验前几个月，我飞往费城拜访玛丽安娜·埃文斯博士，她是一位正畸医生和牙科研究者（an orthodontist and dental researcher），在过去的几年里一直在研究古代和现代人类头骨的口腔。 我们站在宾夕法尼亚大学考古与人类学博物馆的地下室，周围有数百个标本。 每张都刻有字母和数字，并印有其“种族”：贝都因人、科普特人、埃及阿拉伯人、非洲出生的黑人。 其中有巴西妓女、阿拉伯奴隶、和波斯囚犯。 有人告诉我，最著名的标本来自一名爱尔兰囚犯，他于 1824 年因杀害和吃掉其他囚犯而被绞死。

这些头骨的历史从200年到数千年不等。 它们是莫顿收藏（the Morton Collection）的一部分，以一位名叫塞缪尔·莫顿 (Samuel Morton) 的种族主义科学家的名字命名，他从 1830 年代开始收集骨骼，试图证明白人种族的优越性，但失败了。 莫顿工作的唯一积极成果是他花了二十年收集的头骨，这些头骨现在为我们提供了“古人”的外观和呼吸方式的一点信息。

【免费阅读到此为止。】

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One

The Worst Breathers in the Animal Kingdom

The patient arrived, pale and torpid, at 9:32 a.m. Male, middle-aged, 175 pounds. Talkative and friendly but visibly anxious. Pain: none. Fatigue: a little. Level of anxiety: moderate. Fears about progression and future symptoms: high.

Patient reported that he was raised in a modern suburban environment, bottle-fed at six months, and weaned onto jarred commercial foods. The lack of chewing associated with this soft diet stunted bone development in his dental arches and sinus cavity, leading to chronic nasal congestion.

By age 15, patient was subsisting on even softer, highly processed foods consisting mostly of white bread, sweetened fruit juices, canned vegetables, Steak-umms, Velveeta sandwiches, microwave taquitos, Hostess Sno Balls, and Reggie! bars. His mouth had become so underdeveloped it could not accommodate 32 permanent teeth; incisors and canines grew in crooked, requiring extractions, braces, retainers, and headgear to straighten. Three years of orthodontics made his small mouth even smaller, so his tongue no longer properly fit between his teeth. When he stuck it out, which he did often, visible imprints laced its sides, a precursor to snoring.

At 17, four impacted wisdom teeth were removed, which further decreased the size of his mouth while increasing his chances of developing the chronic nocturnal choking known as sleep apnea. As he aged into his 20s and 30s, his breathing became more labored and dysfunctional and his airways became more obstructed. His face would continue a vertical growth pattern that led to sagging eyes, doughy cheeks, a sloping forehead, and a protruding nose.

This atrophied, underdeveloped mouth, throat, and skull, unfortunately, belongs to me.

I'm lying on the examination chair in the Stanford Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery Center looking at myself, looking into myself. For the past several minutes, Dr. Jayakar Nayak, a nasal and sinus surgeon, has been gingerly coaxing an endoscope camera through my right nasal cavity. He's gone so deep into my head that it's come out the other side, into my throat.

"Say eeee," he says. Nayak has a halo of black hair, square glasses, cushioned running shoes, and a white coat. But I'm not looking at his clothes, or his face. I'm wearing a pair of video goggles that are streaming a live feed of the journey through the rolling dunes, swampy marshes, and stalactites inside my severely damaged sinuses. I'm trying not to cough or choke or gag as that endoscope squirms a little farther down.

"Say eeee," Nayak repeats. I say it and watch as the soft tissue around my larynx, pink and fleshy and coated in slime, opens and closes like a stop-motion Georgia O'Keeffe flower.

This isn't a pleasure cruise. Twenty-five sextillion molecules (that's 250 with 20 zeros after it) take this same voyage 18 times a minute, 25,000 times a day. I've come here to see, feel, and learn where all this air is supposed to enter our bodies. And I've come to say goodbye to my nose for the next ten days.

For the past century, the prevailing belief in Western medicine was that the nose was more or less an ancillary organ. We should breathe out of it if we can, the thinking went, but if not, no problem. That's what the mouth is for.

Many doctors, researchers, and scientists still support this position. Breathing tubes, mouth breathing, and nasal breathing are all just means to the same end. There are 27 departments at the National Institute of Health devoted to lungs, eyes, skin disease, ears, and so on. The nose and sinuses aren't represented in any of them.

Nayak finds this absurd. He is the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. He heads an internationally renowned laboratory focused entirely on understanding the hidden power of the nose. He's found that those dunes, stalactites, and marshes inside the human head orchestrate a multitude of functions for the body. Vital functions. "Those structures are in there for a reason!" he told me earlier. Nayak has a special reverence for the nose, which he believes is greatly misunderstood and underappreciated. Which is why he's so interested to see what happens to a body that functions without one. Which is what brought me here.

Starting today, I'll spend the next quarter of a million breaths with silicone plugs blocking my nostrils and surgical tape over the plugs to stop even the faintest amount of air from entering or exiting my nose. I'll breathe only through my mouth, a heinous experiment that will be exhausting and miserable, but has a clear point.

Forty percent of today's population suffers from chronic nasal obstruction, and around half of us are habitual mouthbreathers, with females and children suffering the most. The causes are many: dry air to stress, inflammation to allergies, pollution to pharmaceuticals. But much of the blame, I'll soon learn, can be placed on the ever-shrinking real estate in the front of the human skull.

When mouths don't grow wide enough, the roof of the mouth tends to rise up instead of out, forming what's called a V-shape or high-arched palate. The upward growth impedes the development of the nasal cavity, shrinking it and disrupting the delicate structures in the nose. The reduced nasal space leads to obstruction and inhibits airflow. Overall, humans have the sad distinction of being the most plugged-up species on Earth.

I should know. Before probing my nasal cavities, Nayak took an X-ray of my head, which provided a deli-slicer view of every nook and cranny in my mouth, sinuses, and upper airways.

"You've got some . . . stuff," he said. Not only did I have a V-shape palate, I also had "severe" obstruction to the left nostril caused by a "severely" deviated septum. My sinuses were also riddled with a profusion of deformities called concha bullosa. "Super uncommon," said Nayak. It was a phrase nobody wants to hear from a doctor.

My airways were such a mess that Nayak was amazed I hadn't suffered from even more of the infections and respiration problems I'd known as a kid. But he was reasonably certain I could expect some degree of serious breathing problems in the future.

Over the next ten days of forced mouthbreathing, I'll be putting myself inside a kind of mucousy crystal ball, amplifying and hastening the deleterious effects on my breathing and my health, which will keep getting worse as I get older. I'll be lulling my body into a state it already knows, that half the population knows, only multiplying it many times.

"OK, hold steady," Nayak says. He grabs a steel needle with a wire brush at the end. It's the size of a mascara brush. I'm thinking, He's not going to put that thing up my nose. A few seconds later, he puts that up my nose.

I watch through the video goggles as Nayak maneuvers the brush deeper. He keeps sliding until the brush is no longer up my nose, no longer playing around my nose hair, but wiggling inside of my head a few inches deep. "Steady, steady," he says.

When the nasal cavity gets congested, airflow decreases and bacteria flourish. These bacteria replicate and can lead to infections and colds and more congestion. Congestion begets congestion, which gives us no other option but to habitually breathe from the mouth. Nobody knows how soon this damage occurs. Nobody knows how quickly bacteria accumulate in an obstructed nasal cavity. Nayak needs to grab a culture of my deep nasal tissue to find out.

I wince as I watch him twist the brush deeper still, then spin it, skimming off a layer of gunk. The nerves this far up the nose are designed to feel the subtle flow of air and slight modulations in air temperature, not steel brushes. Even though he's dabbed an anesthetic in there, I can still feel it. My brain has a hard time knowing exactly what to do, how to react. It's difficult to explain, but it feels like someone is needling a conjoined twin that exists somewhere outside of my own head.

"The things you never thought you'd be doing with your life," Nayak laughs, putting the bleeding tip of the brush into a test tube. He'll compare the 200,000 cells from my sinuses with another sample ten days from now to see how nasal obstruction affects bacterial growth. He shakes the test tube, hands it to his assistant, and politely asks me to take the video goggles off and make room for his next patient.

Patient #2 is leaning against the window and snapping photos with his phone. He's 49 years old, deeply tanned with white hair and Smurf-blue eyes, and he's wearing spotless beige jeans and leather loafers without socks. His name is Anders Olsson, and he's flown 5,000 miles from Stockholm, Sweden. Along with me, he's ponied up more than $5,000 to join the experiment.

I'd interviewed Olsson several months ago after coming across his website. It had all the red flags of flakiness: stock images of blond women striking hero poses on mountaintops, neon colors, frantic use of exclamation points, and bubble fonts. But Olsson wasn't some fringe character. He'd spent ten years collecting and conducting serious scientific research. He'd written dozens of posts and self-published a book explaining breathing from the subatomic level on up, all annotated with hundreds of studies. He'd also become one of Scandinavia's most respected and popular breathing therapists, helping to heal thousands of patients through the subtle power of healthy breathing.

When I mentioned during one of our Skype conversations that I would be mouth breathing for ten days during an experiment, he cringed. When I asked if he wanted to join in, he refused. "I do not want to," he declared. "But I am curious."

Now, months later, Olsson plops his jet-lagged body into the examination chair, puts on the video glasses, and inhales one of his last nasal breaths for the next 240 hours. Beside him, Nayak twirls the stainless-steel endoscope the way a heavy metal drummer handles a drumstick. "OK, lean your head back," says Nayak. A twist of the wrist, a crane of the neck, and he goes deep.

The experiment is set up in two phases. Phase I consists of plugging our noses and attempting to live our everyday lives. We'll eat, exercise, and sleep as usual, only we'll do it while breathing only through our mouths. In Phase II, we'll eat, drink, exercise, and sleep like we did during Phase I, but we'll switch the pathway and breathe through our noses and practice a number of breathing techniques throughout the day.

Between phases we'll return to Stanford and repeat all the tests we've just taken: blood gases, inflammatory markers, hormone levels, smell, rhinometry, pulmonary function, and more. Nayak will compare data sets and see what, if anything, changed in our brains and bodies as we shifted our style of breathing.

I'd gotten a fair share of gasps from friends when I told them about the experiment. "Don't do it!" a few yoga devotees warned. But most people just shrugged. "I haven't breathed out of my nose in a decade," said a friend who had suffered allergies most of his life. Everyone else said the equivalent of: What's the big deal? Breathing is breathing.

Is it? Olsson and I will spend the next 20 days finding out.

. . .

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.

I'd been feeling these cracks for much of my life, and chances are you have, too: stuffy noses, snoring, some degree of wheezing, asthma, allergies, and the rest. I'd always thought they were a normal part of being human. Nearly everyone I knew suffered from one problem or another.

But I came to learn that these problems didn't randomly develop. Something caused them. And the answers could be found in a common and homely human trait.

A few months before the Stanford experiment, I flew to Philadelphia to visit Dr. Marianna Evans, an orthodontist and dental researcher whoÕd spent the last several years looking into the mouths of human skulls, both ancient and modern. We were standing in the basement of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, surrounded by several hundred specimens. Each was engraved with letters and numbers and stamped with its ÒraceÓ: Bedouin, Copt, Arab of Egypt, Negro Born in Africa. There were Brazilian prostitutes, Arab slaves, and Persian prisoners. The most famous specimen, I was told, came from an Irish prisoner whoÕd been hanged in 1824 for killing and eating fellow convicts.

The skulls ranged from 200 to thousands of years old. They were part of the Morton Collection, named after a racist scientist named Samuel Morton, who, starting in the 1830s, collected skeletons in a failed attempt to prove the superiority of the Caucasian race. The only positive outcome of Morton's work is the skulls he spent two decades gathering, which now provide a snapshot of how people used to look and breathe.

A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020
An Amazon Best Science Book of 2020
2020 ASJA Award-Winner in the General Nonfiction Category
A Goodreads Award Finalist for Best Science & Technology Book of the Year
Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR


“A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual, and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time. I already feel calmer and healthier just in the last few days, from making a few simple changes in my breathing, based on what I’ve read…Our breath is a beautiful, healing, mysterious gift, and so is this book.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love

"I highly recommend this book." —Wim Hof 

“Who would have thought something as simple as changing the way we breathe could be so revolutionary for our health? James Nestor is the perfect guide to the pulmonary world and has written a fascinating book, full of dazzling revelations.” —Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, international bestselling author of The Stress Solution

“It’s a rare popular-science book that keeps a reader up late, eyes glued to the pages. But Breath is just that fascinating. It will alarm you. It will gross you out. And it will inspire you. Who knew respiration could be so scintillating?” —Spirituality & Health

"In Breath, author and journalist James Nestor lays out in spellbinding and at once comedic and riveting fashion his ten year personal investigation of breathing. Who could imagine a “self help book” that reads like a page turning novel?! I couldn’t put it down."—Steven Gundry, M.D., New York Times bestselling author of The Plant Paradox series, The Longevity Paradox, and The Energy Paradox

“With his entertaining, eerily well-timed new book, James Nestor explains the science behind proper breathing and how we can transform our lungs and our lives. The book is brisk and detailed, a well-written read that is always entertaining, as he melds the personal, the historical, and the scientific.” —The Boston Globe

“A transformative book that changes how you think about your body and mind.” —Joshua Foer, New York Times–bestselling author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Memory
 
“Breath provides a new perspective of modern-day technology and how we’ve unknowingly abandoned the answers we’ve always had. James Nestor artfully brings back what modern society has walked away from, by combining ancestral techniques and new age technology in one elegant book.” —Scientific Inquirer

"A wonderful book that reminds and enlightens us about how breath and mind are intertwined."—
Dr. Rahul Jandial, bestselling author of Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon

“Breath is an utterly fascinating journey into the ways we are wired. No matter who you are, you’ll want to read this.” —Po Bronson, New York Times–bestselling author of What Should I Do with My Life? and coauthor of NutureShock

“An eye-opening, epic journey of human devolution that explains why so many of us are sick and tired. A must-read book that exposes what our health care system doesn’t see.” —Dr. Steven Y. Park, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, author of Sleep, Interrupted 

“I don’t say this often, but when I do I mean it: This book changed my life. Breath is part scientific quest, part historical insight, part Hero’s Journey, full of groundbreaking ideas, and a rollicking good read. I had no idea that the simple and intuitive act of inhaling and exhaling has taken such an evolutionary hit. As a result, I figured out why I sleep so badly and why my breathing feels so often out of sync. With a few simple tweaks, I fixed my breathing and fixed myself. A transformational book!” —Caroline Paul, bestselling author of The Gutsy Girl

“Breath shows us just how extraordinary the act of breathing is and why so much depends on how we do it. An enthralling, surprising, and often funny adventure into our most overlooked and undervalued function.” —Bonnie Tsui, author of Why We Swim and American Chinatown

"A welcome, invigorating user’s manual for the respiratory system." —Kirkus Reviews

“If you want to read a book about the power of the breath, this is it!”—Patrick McKeown, bestselling author of The Oxygen Advantage

“Although we all breathe, there is an art and science to breathing correctly . . . Full of fascinating information an compelling arguments, this eye-opening (or more aptly a mouth-closing and nostril-opening) work is highly recommended.” —Library Journal

"This is the best book I've ever read! You won’t be able to put it down." —Dr. John Douillard DC CAP, elite trainer and author of Body, Mind, and Sport