And what about people like David Blaine or Tom Sietas? Sietas held his breath underwater for over 22 minutes (world record). I know they train for it like months and even years, but doesn’t holding your breath = no oxygen to brain?
Permanent brain damage apparently occurs just after 4 minutes of lack of oxygen to the brain, so why are freedivers left generally unscathed after 8 or 10 minutes without air?
In: Biology
That surviving “4 to 6 minutes *without oxygen*” means with NO oxygen being supplied. Like, if they cut off your head and kept the blood in somehow.
If you take a deep breath and hold it, your lungs are full of air with oxygen that can be extracted and brought to your brain over the next several minutes. Then once that’s gone, you have 4-6 minutes with “no” oxygen before you’d die.
Pro divers take it further by also hyperventilating until their blood gets saturated with oxygen too, and *then* they take a huge breath. So their blood is full of oxygen, their lungs are full of oxygen, and they’ve trained their bodies to use as little as possible so that more is left to be carried to the brain over those incredible 15-20 minute periods.
But it’s not that their brain is going without oxygen for those 20 minutes. Blaine’s brain needs oxygen at least every 6 minutes too. What the training does is allow them to take in, hold, and deliver that oxygen from their huge breath efficiently.
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