Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

If you're not breathing correctly, it doesn't matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how slender you are, how youthful you are, or how smart you are.

Breathing is the most fundamental activity for maintaining our health and well-being; it involves taking in and exhaling air twenty-five thousand times a day. However, humans as a species have lost the capacity to breathe properly, which has serious ramifications.

Journalist James Nestor explores the globe in an effort to identify the problem and provide solutions. The solutions lie not in pulmonology laboratories, as one would think, but in the murky excavations of secret Soviet institutions, choir schools in New Jersey, ancient burial sites, and the smog-filled neighbourhoods of Sao Paulo. Nestor follows individuals who are delving into the obscure science behind traditional breathing techniques like Tummo, Sudarshan Kriya, and Pranayama. Together with pulmonary tinkerers, they conduct experimental experiments that challenge long-held notions about human respiration.

According to current studies, even little changes in how we breathe in and out may improve internal organ health, athletic performance, stop snoring, asthma, and autoimmune diseases, and even straighten scoliotic spines. All of this ought to be unattainable, yet it is.

Breath challenges our preconceived notions about our most fundamental biological function by drawing on thousands of years' worth of medical books as well as current, state-of-the-art research in the fields of pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology. Your breathing will never be the same.