Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
⭐️
Am I missing something? Why does this book have good reviews? Some people mentioned that this book is 80% crackpot and 20% interesting insights and techniques? If this is the case, I still can’t trust this book after all the crackpot stuff — how am I supposed to sift through the bs? The author doesn’t understand causation vs correlation. He doesn’t understand the difference between anecdotes and data. This is loaded with confirmation bias, wild speculation, and a layer of mysticism.
Ex: There was one anecdote about a girl who was experiencing many creative hallucinations. The doctors figured that this was because she was breathing only through her left nostril which was constantly stimulating her right, creative side of her brain. To fix these hallucinations, they had her breathe out of her right nostril to activate the left logical hemisphere, and she stopped hallucinating. The author then went to go on about the effects of breathing through different nostrils. WHAT PSEUDOSCIENCE BS IS THIS. AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TRUST ANYONE’S CLAIMS AFTER THEY DECIDE TO PUT THIS IN A WRITTEN BOOK THAT UNDERWENT MANY REVIEWS BEFORE PUBLISHING. Perhaps this specific instance has some kind of logical, interesting phenomena behind it, but if that was the case the author completely failed to clearly mention it. The author also names a variety of odd medical claims that occurred as a result of changing their breathing without substantial backing, instead talking about healers that helped people breath to fix their ailments in the same way one would talk about prophets healing a sick village.
Idk, I only got 25% of the way through the book before I decided it wasn’t worth my time. I hope I’m not missing something.