Controlled oxygen reduction can boost brainpower without moving a muscle

It's well known that exercise is good for your brain. For years, scientists have shown even a single session of heart-pumping activity can sharpen executive function—the mental skills we use to plan, focus attention, remember instructions and juggle tasks.

Matthew Heath and his team set out to determine if they could elicit the same exercise-induced brain response in a way that doesn't require movement.

They studied a technique called intermittent hypoxia, a method that temporarily reduces the amount of oxygen a person breathes, then restores it to normal, repeating the cycle over a 60-minute session.

"It's like sending a person up to the top of Everest and back down again several times," said Heath. "And what we found is that just one bout of intermittent hypoxia led to a marked improvement in executive function."

The research team enrolled 24 healthy young adults in the study. Participants wore a facemask that lowered their oxygen intake to 11% for five minutes, roughly what you'd experience at high altitude, before returning it to the normal 21% found at sea level. Throughout the session, researchers monitored ventilatory and cardiac measures as well as brain blood flow.

Prior to and following the hypoxia intervals, participants completed an antisaccade task—a standardized test of executive function that requires individuals to look away from a visual stimulus, engaging focused attention and inhibitory control.

Unlike previous studies that measured cognitive changes after multiple sessions, this research showed one round of intermittent hypoxia was enough to produce a measurable brain boost.

The researchers believe the boost to executive function is tied to physiological changes triggered by the reduced oxygen. When oxygen levels drop, the body responds by increasing blood flow to the brain and enhancing its ability to extract oxygen more efficiently.

The research team enrolled 24 healthy young adults in the study. Participants wore a face mask that lowered their oxygen intake to 11% for five minutes, roughly what you'd experience at high altitude, before returning it to the normal 21% found at sea level.

24 adults in the study is a start and as such totally unworthy of publishing. At the O2 levels in the study equivalent to altitude one would be a little gaga and some as myself due to age and reduced pulmonary function due to age unconscious.

My above screed is not to condemn the study. My purpose is to condemn the "Peer Review Process" that would not condemn such a crap study.

Peer Review is by associates with a common agenda and thus corrupt.

I am old and by definition of education a scientists. When young I believed science and discovery and still do. When politics and socialistics entered science via government research grants I stopped believing once great journals of science such as Nature and in particular Scientific America.

Science is never settled unless it is dogma and thus not science.

Back in the early 1990’s I attended a seminar with several scientists who studied altered states of consciousness. One old man was sharing with me privately the experiences he had supervising the LSD experiments for the CIA in the 1950’s.

They found that inducing hypoxia by increasing the percentage of CO2 a subject breathed and observing the subject’s response, they could screen out people who were most likely to have a bad trip when on LSD.

We discussed why, and theorized that fear of suffocation triggered a response to hypoxia similar to the fear of their ego diminishing while on LSD. Fear lowers consciousness and causes bad LSD trips. (This was after a research scientist, Frank Olson, with the Special Operations Division of the United States Army Biological Warfare at Ft Dietrich was given LSD in his coffee by his colleague Sidney Gottlieb (head of the CIA’s MKUltra program) and, nine days later, plunged to his death from the window of the Hotel Statler in New York from a bad trip.)

I’ve lectured several times on the dangers of using drugs for spiritual growth, explaining that it is like being a peeping Tom, allowing a perception of the transcendent experience without actually going through the window and fully experiencing it. (Love is the key ingredient necessary to combine and stabilize the two aspects of human consciousness.)

The drugs cause a disconnect between the emotional feminine subconscious and the masculine ego identity consciousness. The dying daily concept in Christianity and the diminished ego in Buddhism that is called the “no-self” are similar except they are done through an integration that stabilizes consciousness rather than a disconnect.

(I have replicated this same experience many times with people using ultra depth hypnosis, a method that distracts the ego giving full access to the emotional subconscious.)

This same transcendent experience also happens to many people prior to death that allows a person to experience the Love and Bliss of the transcendent experience. I call it the pre-death agitation phase of the death experience where the ego diminishes allowing a person to perceive and experience Heaven, including their loved ones who died previously.

Several years ago when the synthetic THC like JWH-18 became popular in bath salts, I attended a psychiatric lecture at a conference by two ER physicians who were explaining their experiences with patients who developed schizophrenia for life after one single experience using the synthetic THC. Since then I have had similar experiences in two separate cases where young women, one 17 and one age 20, developed schizophrenia after one single use of the spiritual drug Ayahuasca. These young women had not developed a strong ego identity in their own consciousness. Thus the drug permanently blocked a future development of an ego identity, resulting in their lifetime schizophrenia. The drugs appear to haved diminished hippocampal function in their brain.

The logical consciousness of the ego that provides the structural framework of consciousness that stabilizes and limits the more creative feminine consciousness is diminished in the drug experience, thus setting it free to explore ideas and concepts that exist in higher frequencies of consciousness. Apparently a similar experience is attained during hypoxia.

A similar experience happens in the depths of despair during the Dark-Night-of-the-Soul experience. This is what Einstein experienced in 1904 that generated his miracle year of ideas including his four published groundbreaking papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the theory of special relativity, and the mass-energy equivalence. When the ego is diminished, human consciousness can access the higher levels of consciousness.

I researched this topic extensively as after my own near death experience in the late 1980’s, I experienced a level of consciousness in meditation that I refer to as the “Divine Library” where all knowledge exists. It is an expanded level of consciousness where I merely need to think of a question and the answer appears and is fully understood as an epiphany. It’s there for everyone in the transcendent experience where our consciousness and perception is no longer restricted to our physical bodies.

It’s what expanded my perception of reality that I am able to read the stored memories of people’s life experiences in their soul. Consciousness became physical to my perception.

This is the kind of quackery I would expect out of Canadians.

In fact, this is EXACTLY how an obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patient has a stroke at age 45.

The brain's blood vessels are exquisitely sensitive to hypoxia.

Periodic hypoxia causes the vessels to dilate -> return to normal size -> dilate -> return to normal size.

OSA patients do this every night, all night, while sleeping.

So the lining of the brain's blood vessels (called the intima) tears because of the repeated stretching and returning to normal size.

This reveals the subendothelial layer to circulating platelets, which are designed to plug leaks and initiate clotting.

Which then leads to strokes.

OSA patients have about a 10-fold risk of stroke. So they get them young, as a part of the overall package.

Good News: CPAP or BiPAP machines correct this and are lifesaving. And after a while (maybe a month) the heart, vessels, brain, etc., go back to normal.

Leaving the patient time to work on weight loss, etc., which is usually the underlying cause of the OSA.