Book Review: Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2020). James Nestor.

This is an entire book on something we all usually take for granted: breathing. 

The author has previously reported on deep-sea “free” divers, who can descend to great depths and stay submerged while holding their breath for long periods of time.  As a result of what he learned in researching the divers, and because of his own health issues, particularly around respiration and nasal congestion, he went on a personal search for more knowledge about this essential and largely automatic human function.  

In the course of the book, he describes many historical and contemporary religious and exercise disciplines that focus on control of breathing as the key to other health, mental and spiritual attainments, and his own experiments in using these techniques to improve his breathing.  

He reveals other intriguing facts too.  One was that the structure of human skulls, and the size and shape of our breathing passages in the nose and mouth, as well as the health of our teeth and jaws, have changed for the worse at two points in human evolution:  first, about 10,000 years ago, when the agricultural revolution began, and humans stopped having to chew their food as hard, and even more dramatically about 300 years ago, with the introduction of soft breads and manufactured food that further softened most of the food in our diets.  Who knew?

In any event, it’s a fascinating tour of the complex role that breathing plays in our health and happiness, and how we can alter and improve our breathing by revisiting techniques that have been known across many human cultures since ancient times. Recommended.