Pushing The Limits Of Extreme Breath-Holding

[Music] inside the tank is Brandon burchak and he is going to attempt to hold his breath for this entire video Brandon is one of the world's foremost experts in breath work so please don't try this at home I'll put his info in the description if you want to learn more I'm going to keep this shot going continuously on the right side of the video and while he's holding his breath we will figure out how he does it and I'm even going to learn how to hold my breath way longer than I ever have before I failed the very first level of swimming because I refused to put my head under water this is somewhat terrifying all the cells of the human body need oxygen in order to survive oxygen to react with glucose and produce ATP the molecule that delivers energy wherever it's needed in a Cell breathing is so important it happens without conscious thought it's under the control of the autonomic nervous system when resting we breathe about 12 times per minute but that rate automatically increases when exercising the brain knows how often we need to breathe using chemical sensors called chemoreceptors there are chemoreceptors for CO2 in the carotid arteries and in the brain stem increasing CO2 in the blood makes it more acidic and it's thought that this CO2 acidity is the main feedback mechanism that regulates breathing CO2 is created at the same rate oxygen is used up so acidic blood tells the body we're building up too much CO2 and therefore running out of oxygen so we better breathe the only known chemoreceptors for low blood oxygen are in the carotid arteries but these are thought to play a smaller role in regulating breathing and this is why hyperventilating before going underwater is a really bad idea because hyperventilating expels a lot of CO2 making the blood more alkaline but it doesn't actually increase the amount of oxygen in the blood which is limited by the concentration of oxygen in the air and the number of red blood cells so with the blood starting out alkaline more CO2 must be produced before the CO2 chemoreceptors give you the urge to breathe which means more oxygen will be used up sometimes to the point where the brain runs out of oxygen to stay conscious so you can black out ...