Picking Your Brain
Posted By Paul Kotik on 10 July 2006
Dr. Potkin is addressing the neurological issue with a preliminary program of brain imaging, focused on subjects who have a lengthy history of deep freediving. I’ve been a subject in these imaging studies, and it is an astounding and more than a bit disconcerting thing to see one’s own thinkum-dinkum at work in high–res. I guess mine still works to some degree - there were significant changes in my brain activity following a very annoying session of computerized cognitive puzzle-solving.
The phenomenon we colloquially term ‘squeeze’ is the third major area Dr.Potkin is interested in, with etiology (i.e., causes) and prophylaxis (prevention) as his immediate medical concerns. He is, after all, a chest doctor. He’s taken spirometry data from the Performance Freediving team members and support freedivers during the Sink Faze trainup and collected anecdotal data from as many freedivers as he could. Here, too, it is premature to report anything in the nature of a finding. There is this, though: Dr. Potkin has observed very significant increases in lung volume after what we call 'packing’. Common knowledge, you say ? Duh ? Not so – Dr. Potkin assures us that the medical community would poppycock the notion that human lung volume can be increased from a non-pathological baseline by any known intervention. You do it, but just so you know: it can’t be done.
I did it in June, 2006 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Surrounded by Dr. Potkin, some skeptical colleagues and technicians, and a few gazillion dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art high-res full-motion imaging gizmos, I have watched my own heart pumping blood: valves opening and closing, blood flowing through the chambers just like in the textbooks. I filled my lungs, stuffed 35 packs into ‘em, and watched the doctors’ numb fascination as my right heart chambers were squeezed flat, blood backwashing toward the lungs, and my blood pressure dropped in seconds to undetectable. All this sitting upright, fully conscious.
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