What It Takes to Hold Your Breath for 24 Minutes (2017)

On this topic, David Blaine's TED talk about holding his breath for 17 minutes is probably the most interesting TED talk there is.

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_...

Wow. That's approaching the time for dolphins, whales and similar sea mammals.

Of course, his record is without doing any work, unlike a dolphin which is swimming.

Free divers are swimming though and their underwater time is very impressive.

Doesn't the brain start to die after 10-15 minutes without oxygen? How could he possibly go that long without breathing without suffering any brain damage? I remember when David Blaine was going for the records, the biggest concern was that he would irreversibly and severely damage his brain.

That's very cool but it's definitely a stunt, breathing pure O2 is definitely not normal.

I'm more impressed by spearos going down for several minutes, swimming hard, doing work, fighting a fish on a line and coming back up. I can manage 1:30 with that kind of activity but I have met folks who can go several minutes.

PSA: Trying to hold your breath for a long time is dangerous, especially if you hyperventilate first. People die this way.

The hyperventilation thing is because your brain needs oxygen to live, but your impulse to breathe is driven by carbon dioxide saturation. When you hyperventilate, you get rid of a ton of carbon dioxide, and you can get into a situation where you don't have enough CO2 buildup to trigger the signal to breathe, but you have so little oxygen that your brain is dying.

Personally, not something I'd like to mess with.

What blows my mind is the guys that actually perform activities diving while holding their breathe for similarly long durations.

Learning to control your body in idle circumstances is impressive in a meditative sense, but how people manage comparable durations while physically active is a different thing entirely.