Word: breath
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...Suppressing the powerful pain impulse too successfully can prove deadly: subjects can continue holding their breath up to the point that their brains shut down from lack of oxygen. If you're 100 feet under water - or even three feet underwater in a pool - it's not a good time to pass out. In order to break the world record, Blaine had to hold his breath without fainting. (Had he continued until he'd depleted his brain's oxygen, however, Potkin is convinced he could have gone for another full minute...
...course, another factor associated with longer holding times is the consumption of pure oxygen beforehand. The world record for holding your breath after inhaling pure oxygen is now Blaine's - 17 minutes and 4 seconds. The record without the pure oxygen, which Blaine failed to break during an attempt last year in Manhattan's Lincoln Center, is 8 minutes and 58 seconds...
...With or without pure oxygen, holding your breath is a difficult and dangerous pastime even for elite athletes. When not done carefully, it can lead to drowning, or to potential tissue damage in the heart, brains or lungs. Preliminary results from Potkin's research into apnea's long-term effects show some abnormal brain scans among young, extreme free divers. There's still much to learn about the phenomenon; as a medical student, Potkin recalls, he was told that no one could hold his breath for more than five minutes without suffering brain damage. Now, he wants...
...David Blaine's is the most harrowing of jobs. The master magician-cum-"endurance specialist" has earned worldwide renown by pushing the limits of the human body. He's buried himself alive for a week, been frozen in ice and, on Wednesday, set a world record by holding his breath for more than 17 minutes. TIME interviewed the Guinness Book of Records' newest entrant about the genesis of his death-defying feats, what it feels like when your body starts eating itself for sustenance, and what stunts are next on his slate...
...That was really hard. It was overwhelmingly intense. I felt my heart suffering, my lungs suffering. The urge to breathe was overwhelming. I'm lucky I did all the training. I trained for five months, pretty hard-core. Every morning I would do CO2 exercises. I'd breathe for 48 minutes, then hold my breath for 12 minutes each hour. I'd do that about three mornings a week. I was able to beat the time I got on Oprah. But that was in a controlled environment, [with] doctors, in a swimming pool, with my body laying horizontal as opposed...