People Have Been Freediving For As Long As You Know

15/04/2022

In his book “Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves”, journalist James Nestor witnessed a man diving 300 feet below the sea’s surface on a single breath. He saw him come back a few minutes later, still alive and well. The man was a freediver and his super-human abilities inspired James to research our little-known sport. Why?

In His Own Words

"The fact that humans can dive that deep, for that long, was something that just completely blew my mind and convinced me that there was something in freediving that I wanted to spend more time researching it, and really exploring it. I learned about something that I'd never heard before, called the Mammalian Dive Reflex. These are a series of triggers in the human body that occur the second we put our faces in the water. So, you know, the old tradition of splashing your face with cool water to get you to calm down, it’s not just psychological, it’s physiological. What happens is, the second your face touches water, your heart rate is going to lower about 30% of its normal resting rate, and blood is gonna start coursing in from your extremities into your chest area, into your core. And the deeper you go in the water, the more pronounced these reflexes become. The body has all of these incredible mechanisms that only occur in water, that protect us from the deepwater pressures, and they’re the exact same reflexes that dolphins and whales and seals have to protect themselves from diving out thousands and thousands of feet deep. So we have those too.

Some scientists named it the “master switch” because we turn from terrestrial to almost aquatic the deeper and deeper we go into the water. I know this sounds totally crazy like some new-age dream, but this is all hard science and people have been studying it for over 50 years. The blood in your veins and mine and in the amniotic fluid in which a fetus develops is about 99% seawater. Is it a coincidence? Maybe. But that seems a little too close for me. A lot of people say that we’ve developed these skills because in the past we needed them. People have been freediving for as long as you know. There’s evidence of freediving 20,000 years ago all over the world. It's just recently that we've stopped freediving because we no longer need to go to the seafloor to get food. We now have fishing boats and nets to do that. So, you know, it's really been a part of our human evolution, being in the water and being deep in the water".

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