Just completed my deep (40m/120ft) diver certification. A significant amount of the course was focused on nitrogen narcosis, and how to handle/detect it.
Apparently, some divers will start feeling the narcotic effect between 20-30m. Beyond 30m, a significant amount of divers can feel the effects.
Beyond 40m is the realm of tech diving, with trimix (helium/nitrogen/oxygen) or even heliox (helium/oxygen). I know nothing about this, so I’ll let others comment.
The interesting thing about this research is that it sort of makes sense, and yet is very surprising. We’re basically continuously narked, we’re just so used to it we don’t even know.
Fun fact: the exact cause of nitrogen narcosis is not exactly understood. It is most likely the fact that at higher partial pressures nitrogen is able to enter the fatty tissues surrounding our nerves. Except for helium, no other gas exists which does not have some form narcotic effect at higher pressures.
Considering the prices of helium, this also explains why many deep divers are starting to consider rebreathers.
Your comment about being continuously narked reminded me how in early human history people relied on low-alcohol beer as a safe water supply. So back then it was a double-whammy.
As far as I understand, historically, alcoholic beverages were primarily invented and used as a water disinfectant. Rum was used in British navy to disinfect fresh water in barrels. Wine was used to dilute it in water till the 20th century. Fun fact, in ancient Greece people who drank pure wine (not diluting it in water) were considered alcoholics and could be publicly denounced. Beer was used as a typical beverage accompanying a meal in many populations (a sandwich with a beer was the closest analogy to the "fast food"). It appears that it is only recently that we have started to consume alcohol for pleasure.
I'm not sure I buy your claim that rum was ever used to 'disinfect' fresh water on British Navy ships. The 'grog' mix they used was not of sufficient ABV to disinfect the water, as it was handed out at a 4:1 ratio of water:rum. It was moreso about making the daily rum ration difficult to hoard, and much more efficient to transport than beer or wine.
Grog was at least 10% alcohol, plus lime juice. Navy rum was 65% or 130 proof. That's more than enough to inhibit most waterborne diseases such as cholera (inhibited in wine at 6.25% abv, though wine has tannins and phenols).
Yikes, I just checked, and Captain Morgan's is 35% Alcohol. I'm aware of Bacardi 151 (75.5% alcohol) which is like fire water to me. Can't imagine drinking something so concentrated regularly.
You can't judge from Bacardi. It's bottom-shelf, young, and pretty rough. I find it unpleasant to drink neat even at 80 proof. A high-quality, aged rum at 130 proof will be plenty fiery, but not as bad as Bacardi 151 diluted to 130 proof.
Of course, the sailors probably didn't drink anything terribly high-end.
I concur, I tried to acquire the taste for 151 in college and even after 4 years of earnest and consistent effort it did not get better. Similar experiments with Everclear and overproof grappa were also unsuccessful.
I would not recommend any of these if one is interested in a pleasant drinking experience.
Lately I've been finding Bourbon to be enjoyable. Woodford Reserve and Bulleit are well-priced and good introductions in my opinion.
If the very elaborate still in a neighbours garage is anything to go by, gin, limoncello and various others can be made this way too. 10+ bubble plates and away he goes.
In my high school days, we used it for Jell-O shots and drunk watermelons. Probably should have used vodka but ever clear was more bang/buck. I remember taking a shot of it once as a group “dare” type situation. It was as awful as you would guess
I've never drunk it. I don't like high proof alcohol.
Once I worked in a very informal lab and we were always looking for alternatives to buying industrial chemicals. I was working with optics, and Everclear came up as a good alternative to denatured alcohol or isopropyl alcohol. My friend who ran a microscope lab said it was pure enough to clean optics... however, since it was illegal to buy in California, we had a friend pick it up in Arizona and drop it off with us.
We put it in the flammable storage cabinet with a label saying it was 95% alcohol. Once during a lab inspection we tried to explain, but the inspector just said "yes, I went to college"
Why would everclear be better than denaturated alcohol? Usually (I live in Europe btw) denaturated alcol is cheaper and has same proof of drinkable liquids.
Good solvent for shellac as well, without the nasty smell and headache from denatured alcohol fumes. Costs more though, since it’s sold and taxed for consumption.
I can't practically get everclear since I live in California, where it's illegal. I use 99% IPA for shellac, it's not denatured but you wouldn't want to drink it anyway.
If I remember correctly, the lower ranking navy members weren't even allowed access to the strong stuff. Only the officers who had to dilute it before giving it to the others.
Rum was not generally used to disinfectant water on Royal Navy vessels. Typically the rum ration was only served with the midday meal. At other times the hands mostly drank plain water that had been stored in wooden barrels (and they complained about the taste).
And it wasn't always rum. If a vessel was on foreign service and rum was unavailable then the crew would be issued an equivalent amount of other booze.
The first comment is on point, pre-Prohibition the US was basically run on good old constitution juice. Turning excess grain into a storage-friendly form that also fetched a good price was a huge economic reality at all levels, from individual farmers to large land-owners. The side effect of that was that where people used to mostly drink cider and ale, applejack and the like, now it was cheaper and acceptable to just stay perpetually lit on whiskey.
While other comments have clearly shown that the alcohol in beer isn't strong enough to disinfect it, the way beer is made is that you first have to disinfect the water you're going to use (by boiling it) and then you store the beer in conditions that stop pathogens getting in. So for those reasons the beer would be safer than water, but you'd have just as much success just boiling some water and using it straight away. The other advantage of beer over water is that if it does get pathogens in it, then it is really obvious, and people know not to drink foul beer [citation needed].
I'm a certified Tech Diver if anyone has questions (TDI AN/DP & Heliox).
Fun fact is the narcotic effect is very sudden for most people at a certain depth (30m for me) and also clears just as quickly. It's more pronounced if you are tired and/or the water is cold.
Helium is very expensive like you say. Normal air fills are like $10 AUD, a tank of Trimix can be hundreds. https://www.scubadoctor.com.au/trimix-requested-mix.htm. Normally you would need 3 or more 12L tanks filled with 240L of gas in each, depending on the dive.
Most people who use it a lot do rebreather diving, where you can recycle a few liters over and over. The rebreather costs $10k AUD + training though and has many more parts that can fail. One is the oxygen sensor, that has limited lifespan and if it fails and you don't catch it quick enough can kill you (you switch over to bailout which is a backup gas supply).
>Except for helium, no other gas exists which does not have some form narcotic effect at higher pressures.
According to something mentioned in passing in a Scott Manley (amateur space youtuber) video about deep-sea diving: at high enough pressures you'll get similar effects from helium. It's thought that you can avoid this by subbing out the helium for hydrogen, but nobody so far has been insane enough to try.
I assume liquid breading is much easier at that point.
>The interesting thing about this research is that it sort of makes sense, and yet is very surprising. We’re basically continuously narked, we’re just so used to it we don’t even know.
I'd be interested in knowing how people are mentally when they're in spacewalk/Mir conditions. (1/3rd atmosphere, pure oxygen.)
Prior to that, in 1992, there was the French COMEX-sponsored HYDRA 10 experiment that saw Théo Mavrostomos dry-dive in a chamber to 701 meters (71.1 bars) - the world's absolute saturation dive depth record. Though that experiment used "only" 20% H2 (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618493-000-technolo...).
Reading that first article freaked the hell out of me, thanks.
Glad there's some people out there nuts enough to push the limits of this stuff. No idea why those people in new zealand don't use pressure suits to dive in that hole though.
I only have high school level chemistry, but if Helium is a noble gas it doesn't bond and so it can't have a narcotic effect, because it doesn't affect the chemistry of the brain
It's narcotic effect comes from lipid solubility (and because it basically crowds out other gases - likely oxygen - needed for chemical reactions). So basically, because it's an inert gas it prevents some reactions.
The narcotic effects of inhaled gasses don't seem to have anything to do with chemical bonds. There's something else going on. Even some noble gasses like argon are highly narcotic.
"We’re basically continuously narked, we’re just so used to it we don’t even know."
Just because one direction on the gradient means that we respond in a way that looks like a narcotic does not mean that the other direction will respond in the opposite manner.
I'm sure the nootropics folks would have discovered being super not high by now if it were as easy as breathing a mixture that doesn't have nitrogen in it.
You'd hope mind-hackers would've explored & confirmed/refuted/quantified the effect, but stuff like this often lies underexplored for decades, despite hints like this 1975 study – which actually shows the 'gradient' of clearer thinking continues in the other direction, no hand-wavy extrapolation required. It's what they found! In 1975!
How long did it take for society to fully recognize, & remediate, the effects of environmental lead? How many people & orgs remain oblivious to the cognitive deficits caused by high indoor CO2 levels?
I hope mind-hackers do some fresh research on this, with the advantage of 2023 levels of wealth/free-time/returns-to-improved-cognition/SCUBA-equipment. There could be some potential for positive surprise around what you're "sure" should've already been discovered.
Maybe it remains underexplored because if you find a significant effect and popularize it, then the substance gets banned. The people interested in using stuff like this have an incentive to avoid scientific research on the subject.
The delivery mechanisms for a nitrogen-free air – be they personal respiration devices or sealed environments – could be onerously regulated, or effectively banned for certain places/purposes.
Occasional helium shortages, and the characterization of terrestrial helium as a 'non-renewable' resource, has also made it the subject of industrial policy, with the federal government maintaining a reserve whose planned privatization is controversial.
Plus, there's often widespread resentment of performance-enhancers – hormones, stimulants, etc – when they are only accessible to a select few.
So I'd not be so sure that, if helium proved an essential part of some novel cognitive enhancement practices, its acquisition & use would remain legally-unencumbered.
Where are you coming up with that nonsense? You can get helium from any gas supplier, confine it indefinitely in tanks, and breathe it using any pressure regulator. No one cares.
A number of municipalities have already banned all helium balloons simply due to litter concerns. Major suppliers rationed helium sales as recently as 2022, after the Ukraine war limited supplies from Russia. Helium has often been the subject of proposed legislation for increased government management of prices or supplies, or special discounts for favored uses.
Now imagine a major new use – displacing nitrogen completely, for cognitive enhancement, for an entire work day – arrives. Some can tolerate traditional pressure regulators, but others dislike their bulk/discomfort – so novel delivery strategies, with more leak/loss (like full-room environments), proliferate.
Prices would be driven up for traditional (& government-favored) medical/industrial/research users. Helium leak detectors in industrial settings would face more false-alarms. Exhalation/outgassing would sometimes cause electronic malfunctions in neighboring offices/apartments. And even if almost everyone gets it right, someone somewhere will err in their processes, injuuring or even killing people.
New supply regulations against this novel, & politically disfavored use, would then be a risk – even if the net performance gains still significant.
As informative precedents, in the US, consumer access to pseudoephedrine, flavored cigarettes, & plastic straws has been noticeably restricted in the last decade, on flimsier rationales. It's become more difficult to acquire racetams & other nootropics in just the last few years. California is in the process of banning all gas appliances, despite a long tradition of cheap/easy access via household utility hookups.
So, while I'd hope you're right that no new restrictions on helium-purchasing would arrive, your certainty seems naive, in a childlike & history-oblivious way, to how reactionary supply-control regulations often develop.
They'll just make using it this way illegal and scrutinize purchases/suppliers as usual. NAC has been an over the counter supplement since the 70s and only an uproar from people a few years ago kept it unbanned by the FDA.
CO2 is a weird one. The science is pretty clear the trend exists and it’s even built into the building codes for HVAC. But some how that information never gets connected to the people that would actually be interested in maximizing cognitive ability.
> Just because one direction on the gradient means that we respond in a way that looks like a narcotic does not mean that the other direction will respond in the opposite manner.
that's literally what this study is about! this study is about how replacing nitrogen with helium decreased reaction time in human participants by over 9%.
as siblings commented, pure oxygen gets you high. a couple of breaths of pure oxygen will relieve pain and induce euphoria. I am not entirely clear on the definition of "narcotic" so i may be being redundant.
My issue, though, is i can't find a way to safely generate oxygen for a decent price. I know electrolysis works, but these atomic sieves look safer. They're also difficult to acquire without a prescription, at least from my searches in the US. And i know lithium can react to generate oxygen, but that's not what i consider "safe".
Someone else in this thread mentioned diving. When I was doing my advanced open water course, we did an exercise to demonstrate nitrogen narcosis. Super simple test: we had a card with the numbers 1-16 written on a 4x4 grid in random order. You have to tap the numbers in order and it’s a timed exercise. We did it on the surface in the boat and again at 30m depth; my performance was maybe 20% slower, my buddy was more like 40-50% slower.
Yeah, apologies, we did the first round about 6 feet below the surface. For me, at least, the resistance wouldn't have made a huge difference anyway; while some people suffer from nitrogen narcosis and don't realize it, I definitely felt mentally "slow" while doing the test at depth. It was frustrating knowing that, 15 minutes earlier, the task felt easy but at depth it felt really mentally challenging. While I was only about 20% slower, the qualitative mental effort was drastically higher.
> My issue, though, is i can't find a way to safely generate oxygen for a decent price.
Depends on the definition of generate and decent price, but you can buy stationary medical oxygen concentrator for $1000, portable for $3000. If you want something easier you can buy pre-filled bottles or refill existing bottles at industrial gas supply places. If you want more, you can get a concentrator setup which small private airports use to refill oxygen bottles for small private airplanes.
And lastly, if you need small amount quickly, you can buy Boost Oxygen Bottles from Amazon.
$1000-$3000 isn't decent for my use case; basically i want to use oxygen instead of ibuprofen for minor aches, coupled with heat or cooling. I find that pure oxygen does wonders for minor headaches and neck pain that i experience. $15-$25 a liter for oxygen is also not a decent price, relatively.
At one point i found some concentrators that were ~$500, sadly i did not order and the brand name was alphabet soup; good luck finding that again!
$1000 is for brand-name. Used/imported are cheaper.
Refills of LOX are cheap, but you need to pay for the cylinder, which is expensive. At the end of the day you can get welding oxygen, which is exactly the same as medical/aviator. (And also you need to handle the cylinder safely)
Anyway, just start with Boost and see if it helps. They run out quickly, but nothing beats the convenience.
New cylinders can get a little pricey but used bottles can be found dime-a-dozen on Craigslist/FB Marketplace/etc. Just need to know how to properly inspect a tank. Gas supply stores can get really particular about BYOBottle because of the safety/liability component, but they'll typically treat a no-fill tank as the deposit for a new tank in much the same way consumer propane tank exchange works.
Boost is likely the way to go for OP. I first saw them in Walmart in 2012 as a freshman at a military college. They made the surprise cadre workouts and X mile rucks suck so much less that I'd buy them all up when we were on liberty to sell out of my supply box. Really clever bit of kit, and the mint scent was a nice touch.
One of the easiest ways to separate oxygen from nitrogen is to cool it down. Oxygen will condense at around 90K, while nitrogen will stay gaseous until 77K. You need some fairly serious energy input to do this, but it'll be safer than doing electrolysis.
All you need is zeolite crystals and a compressor. Zeolite fixes nitrogen under pressure, so you can use it to separate nitrogen from oxygen. This is how those "oxygen concentrators" work. I'm sure you get can hold of a relatively-cheap chinese one, they don't have dangerous parts or controlled substances. But it wouldn't be that hard to build one from scratch either.
> Sorry, your search "oxygen concentrator" did not match any products. Please try again.
i thought it might be because of the /w/wholesale path, so i went to aliexpress (i have an account) and searched on the main page, and it gave the same result. Curiously, "oxygen concentrat" as the search term brings up alleged devices. This dovetails with my very short comment that such devices are hard to find without prescriptions, in the US.
Searching for similar things on amazon only brings up carrying cases and accessories for the "well known" brand(s) of oxygen concentrators. And for some reason both sites show results for these things that blow air in your face for whatever reason...
AliExpress search is kinda wonky, it sometimes just breaks for a bit on specific search terms, or maybe it'll work but only for certain sort orders.
The link is giving search results for me (although admittedly I'm not in the US, so if they're doing any country-specific filtering for US clients I wouldn't know about it).
Wow. Indeed my country was not set to USA. It seems that they do filter the results for USA customers, and researching further suggests that the FDA's position is that they not be used without a prescription. But is it illegal to sell one? Is it illegal to even make one? The situation seems murky. And silly.
> I'm sure the nootropics folks would have discovered being super not high by now if it were as easy as breathing a mixture that doesn't have nitrogen in it.
Maybe this is what Oxygen Bars are actually about but nobody knows it yet.
Also there are plenty of drugs that make you more focused, but they also make you _high_ at a certain dosage, _normal_ is just what's the default level.
While I am certified for Nitrox diving, I'm not sure I would actually use it very much. After over 100 open water dives and many dive classes (I was one class away from being a certified instructor back in the 1970s) I realized that I didn't want to do extreme diving. Night dives in the Caribbean are exciting enough. Wreck diving, ice diving, cave diving, commercial diving, hard hat diving all seem too dangerous. Diving in the warm, clear Caribbean was great, and 75% of that experience can be obtained with just a snorkel, mask and flippers.
One of my friends was a commercial diver working on Oil platforms in the North Sea. Out of the eight divers he worked with, he is the only one that lived through it without serious injury.
Nitrox is the single most issued specialisation. It’s most useful for repeat dives and on reasonably shallow dives. The most benefit you’ll get is in the 20-30m range.
As I mostly dive cold waters, I use a max PO2 of 1.4, instead of the 1.6 that some people use. This means that for deep dives (30-40m), I typically end up with EAN28 instead of the more common EAN32.
Nitrox is definitely not “extreme diving”, though. It’s just a way to increase your bottom time and reduce your surface interval. Just remember to keep an eye on your CNS%—there’s a limit to how much oxygen your body can safely handle.
I have experienced nitrogen narcosis before. It was like getting drunk very fast, including the room spinning. I hugged myself and ascended maybe 2-4m above the rest of the group and got back to normal pretty quickly after that and was able to continue to the dive.
There's no need to handle narcosis, just use more helium. Regardless of whether you subjectively feel it, the effect is always there and increases progressively with depth. Some divers claim that they can adapt to it and minimize the effects through repeated exposure but there's no reliable evidence that really works; I think they're just fooling themselves.
Note that some of the serious narcotic effects that divers feel are often due to CO2, which is even more narcotic than nitrogen. If you exert yourself and don't ventilate effectively then hypercapnia can hit you hard. Adding more helium to the mix also helps with this by reducing the gas density and making it easier to blow off the CO2.
It's due to the narcotic effects of nitrogen that GUE (Global Underwater Explorers, a diving association rooted in tech/cave diving) uses EAN32 (32% oxygen) as their standard breathing gas.
They're also more conservative in their recreational diving depths: 30m (100ft) is the recreational limit, beyond that technical certification and a helium-based breathing gas (e.g. Trimix) are required.
I think you misunderstood the GUE standards. Nitrox isn't significant less narcotic than air. They set a 100 ft equivalent narcotic depth maximum limit somewhat arbitrarily because empirically that seems to be pretty safe. Below that depth we add progressively more helium to the mix to limit narcosis as well as gas density (work of breathing).
The action potential is an electrical manipulation of reversible abrupt phase changes in the lipid bilayer. Normally the lipid bilayer is in a liquid phase but the the switching out of monovalent sodium for bivalent calcium ions changes the number of phospholipid carboxyl head groups each ion is electrostatically associated with. This changes the heat capacity and causes the lipid membrane to become a solid/gel phase. The action potential itself is the propagation of this solid phase.
This is how thermodynamics can effect neurons. And this is why dissolving gases into the lipid membrane, like nitrogen in the article, cause change the thermodynamic properties like the heat capacity and retard the solid phase a bit. Light gases increase liquidity. That's the anesthetic effect that reduces firing rates. And that's why local atmospheric pressure matters in gas anesthesia dosing.
It's not that the old hogkin-huxley purely electrical circuit model is "wrong", it's a fine approximation of some effects. But it certainly can't explain the reversible uptake and release of heat during a passing action potential, nor the changes in birefringence and optical scattering, nor why nitrogen can act as an anesthetic like in this case.
Yeah, physician (pathologist, specifcally) with a degree in physics here. I'm going through articles in other tabs right now just because I'm skeptical enough to consider crazy ideas (always good to build bulwarks), this is, at best hypothetical, but mainly the chain of causality in the above statements is a hot mess.
I spend a lot of time looking at cell membranes. More than almost all of humanity. The naive Fluid Mosaic Model is certainly incomplete, but let's let Dr. Nicholson himself (the author of the original description) have a chance to provide his update first (1). So, yes, there's lot of other stuff going on, but certainly the basic organizing concepts are intact.
I'll allow the idea that the transfer of ions across the membrane is a thermodynamic effect. Of course it is. The whole nitrogen vs helium thing works well enough in my mind with just "thermodynamics". Yeah, sure.
But this statement "The action potential itself is the propagation of this solid phase" does not pass the sniff test for me. The action potential is a self-propagating electric field tripping channels along the way, propagating along inner and outer surfaces of the membrane, the channels are what make it self-propagating. Nothing about the concept of "solid" makes sense at these scales in a biological system. Everything is just more or less bound, and that neighbor-to-neighbor binding is entirely secondary to the mammoth electrical field whipping down the axon.
(1) Nicholson GL, de Mattos GF. A Brief Introduction to Some Aspects of the Fluid–Mosaic Model of Cell Membrane Structure and Its Importance in Membrane Lipid Replacement. 2021. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8708848/
Yes, this is a contested theory, but it's not a crackpot theory. I'm well aware of the fluid mosaic model. It is not mutually exclusive with what I've described, in fact it's the base from which this theory is formed. And it is not my theory, but the theory first formulated by literally the guy that discovered the mechanism of action of myelinated action potentials (Ichiji Tasaki, who worked on it during his entire time at the NIH). Call it crackpot if you want but please don't do so just because you've misinterpreted a a short forum post trying to introduce a complex concept in a concise way.
To clear it up for you, the transfer of ions across the membrane by ion channels is not something I'm debating. Nor am I saying that the electrical field isn't required for the action potential to propagate. If you took that away from my post I can understand you thinking it's crackpottery. I'm just saying it's not the whole picture. When there's lots of light gas anesthetic dissolved in the lipid membrane keeping the heat capacity low (disordered) it is thermodynamically harder (requires more energy) to form the organized 'solid' (actually more like a gel to be pedantic) state that propagates with/as the action potential.
All these things are happening together, and more (like, how the lateral pressure profile might link the lipid state to ion channel conformational changes, etc). Simple electrical models cannot explain reversible uptake and release of heat (resistance cannot do this) with the passing of the action potential. Nor the reason atmospheric pressure changes dosage, nor the reason there's a change in optical birefringence and scattering. So you know what it describes is not the full picture. But don't take my word for it, go read Tasaki or Heimburg's work on this if you want to understand the detail. http://erewhon.superkuh.com/library/Neuroscience/Lipid%20Mem...
More seriously - thanks for that description! It's always interesting to see just how many "principles" &/ "laws" etc. (our compartmentalized / simplified models) underlie certain kinds of physical behavior (and, sort of, emergent properties thereof). Even just sticking together enough of the simplest models can be kind of surprising and not so easy to reason about / handle with much "facility".
I've never learned much about anesthesia, and the little bits I have learned, here and there - and usually only in very specific contexts, makes it so most of this info doesn't really stick in my head. So, I appreciate getting a bit of refresher / learning every now and again. Particularly, in how it ties together with everything else involved.
Worth noting that, while this model has been around for a few decades, it does not have many adherents among neuroscientists. Which is not to say that it is wrong necessarily, just that I wouldn't want readers to get the wrong idea that this is a consensus view.
neuroscientists are just mad that "gut feeling" is actually the truth, and we're generally being manipulated by the billions of microbes in our guts. Simple example: why do people crave cake when they're on a diet that doesn't allow cake? There are microbes that convert stuff in grasses (corn, etc) into opioids. Opioids are great, make us feel great, and if we are used to having opioids and suddenly stop, we go into opioid withdrawal.
I haven't really put a fine point on the grand theory of gut-mind-body interaction, but i'm fairly certain that nearly every disorder or disease that isn't external (like radiation or malaria) will eventually be traced back to gut flora, from auto-immune disorders to depression.
Cake does not generally contain grasses...and if it were true that there were trains of gut flora that converted sugars to opioids almost everyone in America would live in a perpetual state of intoxication. Sugar withdrawal is also not even remotely similar to opioid withdrawal.
No, wheat is made from the seeds, i.e., the grain, of wheatgrass, not the grass.
That some bacteria are able to eat the cellulose or other cells in grass is absolutely unrelated to their ability to consume the completely different structures and nutrients in a seed.
If you're going to say something silly like sugar is a grass it's clear you don't know what you're talking about and I'm going to leave this conversation.
Most sugar in the U.S. is made from beets, which are not a grass.
Also...dark chocolate, soy, spinach, fruit, meat, and coffee are opiate triggers, so if sugar is bad because it triggers an opiate response, so is most of the human diet. It turns out the bodies response to eating...is to trigger an opiate response.
>Sugar cane production
Sugar cane is a grass native to Asia and grows mostly in tropical and subtropical areas. In terms of the U.S. sugar cane production by state, it is mainly concentrated in the federal states of Florida, Louisiana, Texas and Hawaii. In 2021, Florida produced around 17.3 million tons of sugar cane and was expected to produce nearly the same quantity the following year. During this period, Florida accounted for more than half of the country’s total sugar cane production. Some nine hundred thousand acres of sugar cane are harvested yearly in the United States, generating over one billion U.S. dollars in annual revenues.
> Since the mid-2000s, sugarcane has accounted for between 40 and 45 percent of the total sugar produced domestically, and sugarbeets accounted for between 55 and 60 percent of production.
Sugar cane is a grass, and when i make a cake i use wheat flour and cane sugar.
I also know about sugar beets, but i specifically said "grasses". Saying that corn and sugar and wheat aren't grasses is hilarious. It doesn't matter what part we eat, as it's the gut flora that process it into the opioids, and they can't tell grass from the thing grass comes from.
Fukudome S.-I., Yoshikawa M. Opioid peptides derived from wheat gluten: Their isolation and characterization. Febs Lett. 1992;296:107–111. doi: 10.1016/0014-5793(92)80414-C. for example
Once you're refining specifically sugarcane down to just sugar, "stuff in grasses" is a really confusing way to describe it. And it's not even right with corn, where the starch has to be chemically altered first.
"neuroscientists" and the like go deep in the weeds with what/how different chemicals interact with cells, neurons, etc; but in general i don't read a lot of papers that try to answer "why". Scientists studied automobiles and discovered that applying pressure to a lever in the car causes the motion of the car to slow and possibly stop. End of paper, we proved cars stopped when we put pressure on a lever. No mention of friction anywhere.
I've been balking about this since at least 2006-2007 online and in person, and it took about a decade for studies that showed "why", not just "how/what". Then again, most people don't know that our bodies have dedicated receptors for nicotinoids, cannibinoids, opioids. Most people also don't know that tomato ketchup has nicotine in it, or that nearly all grasses contain the precursors to opioids in them. Once your intestines get a substance, nearly all bets are off as to what comes out, at what rate, and what volume.
So, essentially, that neuroscientists disagree isn't novel. They're laser focused on the post hoc, rather than the cause(s).
Are you saying that what's happening is the permeability of the cell membrane changes with their physical states (from a scale of "more liquid" to "more solid")and that change impacts the transmission rate of the neurons? And an example of this would be an anesthesiologist putting you under is them making your cell membrane more solid to increase the resistance those neuron transmissions experience, just like adding more resistance to a circuit to reduce the voltage?
Disclaimer that biological sciences aren't my strength so I'm just trying to understand what you're saying.
No, it's not about ions going through the membrane or membrane pemeability. It is not about resistance to ions flow across the 10nm they travel perpendicular to the membrane. Transport of ions across through ion channels are required for the effect but the membrane itself (usually) is not leaking and I'm not talking about changes in leakage.
It is about how the various ions like Na+ and Ca+2 associated with the membrane itself to change the membrane's physical properties. When there's lots of light gas anesthetic dissolved in the lipid membrane keeping the heat capacity low (disordered) it is thermodynamically harder (requires more energy) to form the organized 'solid' (actually more like a gel) state that propagates as the action potential.
[1975]. Funny concluding paragraph: "Both theories of anesthetic action and the evidence cited in this report suggest that the nitrogen concentration in atmospheric air causes a measurable performance decrement in man, that the "nitrogen blanket" effect suggested by Miles[10] is a real phenomenon, and that human history has proceeded under partial narcosis. Perhaps this explains the current state of world affairs"
9% decrease in response time would be pretty significant for gamers.
Look out for LED illuminated gamer branded helium tanks.... and if you think online gamer chat is annoying now, wait until you get called a noob in a super high pitched voice.
A 10% increase in reaction time could be fairly significant in many sports. Could we start seeing football players, sprinters, or baseball players breathing from masks between plays?
You already see this. Google "NFL oxygen masks". I'm sort of surprised I haven't heard about it in the context of shorter physical sports: I'd wonder what effect it would have on an 100m/200m/400m time or shotput distance to oxygen saturate like free divers do.
I think an NFL lineup would be significantly less intimidating with their lungs full of helium. It's a pretty funny thing to imagine. (referring to the effect of helium on voices)
You don't see NFL players using oxygen masks much anymore. Some people used to believe that it accelerated recovery from hard exertion but experiments have shown that it makes no significant difference. It's a placebo effect if anything.
Disc: Generally speaking, not spesific to the oxygen mask thing.
> Some people believe it but experiments have shown that it makes no significant difference. It's a placebo effect.
I cannot count the amount of times I heard this on medicines and treatments. A too high percentage of them turn out to be not plasebo after a short amount of time. I believe “the experiments shown <anecdatolly working and commonly practised treatment> is plasebo” is the the first line of defense of the medical status quo against change.
If your operation has reached the point where milliseconds matter..something likely has gone wrong.
I'd be curious to see data on how other cognitive metrics change in absence of atmospheric nitrogen. Abstract reasoning / mental math abilities / etc. It's possible some actually improve, just like I might rush and make more errors while doing something after drinking a few coffees.
While scuba diving, nitrogen narcosis stops the instant you ascend a bit (the typical recommendation is to reduce the ambient pressure by one atmosphere). I don’t think there is anything in this study that indicates the effect lasts more than a few minutes after exposure ceases.
Depending on exactly what one's doing, it's easily conceivable that the exposure can be concurrent with the activity. Maybe not football, where lugging around a compressed gas tank on the field is likely impractical if not dangerous, but a sport like Formula 1 or many E-sports would likely be quite conducive for an individual, and other sports like wrestling or swimming could probably be done entirely in a room with a modified atmosphere.
My understanding from the lit, & experience, is that there's a natural high/mild-euphoria from moving to higher-altitude (despite slight cognitive impairment) for the 1st 24-48 hours. That can then give way to crankiness, until slower adaptation progresses.
And: theres some evidence depression/suicide rates higher even at the mild elevations of places of like Reno NV (~4500'), Bend OR (3500'), or Boulder CO (5500').
There's a lot of different things that happen to the body at altitude.
For example: The kidneys take over shunting some wastes out that your lungs can't breathe out due to the thinning atmosphere. This means you urinate more which drags electrolytes with it and likely other things.
I couldn't begin to guess what might be going on with you based on what little you have said.
The sweet spot for me is a particular mountain I go to which starts at 1200m and goes to 2000 (although I don't spend time at the peak - it's a ski field).
Thanks for your anecdote, now I feel I can take my observations more seriously
It could also be the sheer concentration of CO2. I work in a forest: 400ppm in the office every morning. Back at home, in the city, 5km away: 580ppm minimum all day long. Maybe cities make people stupid :D
It's incredible how quickly CO2 can build up inside a room. I'm also in a small village, and CO2 is 420ppm-ish outside. In my home office right now with the window open but no through flow, it's 1800ppm. If I close the window, it'll head off the scale of my CO2 monitor, above 5000ppm. Now that definitely is in the realm of cognitive impairment. I need some better ventilation.
Fair. My appropriate point of comparison (if I wasn't currently nitrogen drunk) should in fact have been mountains <1000m. Which I also love, but they don't have that clear headed altitude feeling.
This was roughly speaking my first thought as well. I thought "Well we always laughed at the sci-fi depictions of people with big cans of air for sale, come pay for premium filtered air ... but this is how that all starts, isn't it. Rich people pay for an air that might make them think 10% faster, then as it starts to normalize to the middle-class, they care less and less about pollutants in the air and eventually we just regard that as a poor-peoples' problem."
I find myself thinking how you might dress or act to disguise it, and then this climactic (i.e. spoiler) scene from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", and finally anxiety about the weird places my mind goes.
Although it's clear you are being facetious, let's see where it goes. I would surmise the best and most economical gas mix to breathe long term at ambient pressure would be somewhere between 80/20 and 75/25 mix of Argon/Oxygen.
My first, brief, dive to 135 feet (41m) was in 1976 off the coast of Cozumel. I was in a group led by a dive master and we quickly descended, swam through a large ring shaped coral structure at around 135ft, and started our ascent. More accurately, all but one of use started our ascent.
Back then, of course, we had to rely on the Navy dive tables for maximum safe bottom time (just 10 min from entry at the surface to start of final assent), and we still added about 5 minutes at 15 feet as a safety stop before exiting the water. These limits, determined by the Navy for Navy divers are intended to prevent decompression sickness (the "bends").
Unrelated to the bends is another hazard, nitrogen narcosis that can interfere with clear thinking. It usually starts to affect people at around 150 feet and I barely noticed it at 135ft. However one diver in the group was affected and after passing through the coral archway continued to swim down the wall of coral toward the bottom at least 100ft deeper. The dive leader had to chase this diver, catch him, and then go though a real decompression stop or two with him on the way up.
Now days, sport divers can explore these depths more safely by using a mix of nitrogen and oxygen called Nitrox which is a 65/35 percent mix of Nitrogen/Oxygen vs the atmospheric proportions of 78/21 percent. This lowers the partial pressure of Nitrogen while diving and thus allows safe diving at greater depths and duration for sport divers.
If the research described by the featured article is true, this suggest a simple performance enhancer. Perhaps in the future, SAT exams will have to outlaw the use of Nitrox SCUBA tanks in the exam room.
Nitrox is any mix of nitrogen and oxygen. It isn't specifically 65/35; other mixes such as 68/32 and 50/50 are also common. Oxygen also seems to have a narcotic effect and so breathing nitrox doesn't significantly reduce narcosis. Thus breathing either nitrox or air below about 100 ft (30 m) isn't a good idea because it impairs your judgment and reaction time. Depending on the exact gas mix and depth, oxygen toxicity can also become a hazard. For deeper dives we add helium to reduce both problems, as well as to reduce work of breathing.
Well and here I was, wondering what would become of all these oxygen bars they opened a few years ago and don't seem to last very long, they can sell helium-therapy now! Good for them!
While anesthesia isn't particularly well understood, the thing that weirds me out is not the neurological mysteries, but that noble gasses like Xenon are anesthetics!
Or just electromagnetism. They still take space and bounce around things. If somebody cut you with a jet of liquid helium you couldn't say, not fair, noble gases shouldn't interact with anything
I wonder how pure oxygen (at low pressure to avoid toxicity) would work. There's still a substantial fire risk, as the Apollo 1 fire demonstrated, but unlike flammable filler gases it won't immediately kill you with a single spark. With a sufficiently fire-proof environment, and a full body fire-proof suit, maybe it could be done.
EDIT: Although it seems the Apollo 1 fire happened with a pressurized oxygen atmosphere, not reduced pressure. Still, reduced pressure has its own dangers, because there could be sudden re-compression if the vacuum chamber failed. Re-compression barotrauma appears to be poorly studied (people don't usually work in partial vacuum). Or you could get crushed to death by the vacuum chamber imploding.
Apollo 1 was high pressure oxygen, since the capsule was still on earth, and they wanted to simulate the positive pressure difference between the inside of the capsule and space. In space it would have been low-pressure oxygen, just enough to satisfy human breathing requirements (so 0.19 atm).
Working from inside a hard-shelled pressure vessel would definitely be inconvenient. You could also build your home office 5000 m above sea level. Or work in a high-altitude balloon.
Either way, the rebreather option seems a lot more practical.
I don't know if you've ever taken a good whiff of acetylene, but I would hate to have to live off it (maybe is it truly odorless, and its just common contamination?)
My understanding is that the characteristc smell of industrial acetylene is a result of sulfur compounds added as odorants (a common practice with odorless gases that create hazards, to make them noticeable.)
Shadow Divers is a good book, but the subjects were hardly the first to use helium mixes to counteract narcosis. That goes back to US military experiments in the 1920s.
Are there any historical relations to this? For example has nitrogen concentration varied across centuries? Or have innovations occured more frequently at higher altitudes?
The effect of nitrogen varies with its pressure, i.e. with its concentration, while no changes are seen when the helium pressure is varied.
This allows the conclusion that nitrogen has anesthetic effect and helium does not have stimulant effect.
Because it appears that the anesthetic effect of inert gases depends on their molecular mass, being much stronger for heavy gases like xenon, it is possible that helium also has an anesthetic effect, but one that becomes noticeable only at higher pressures than can be safely tested.
Essentially true by definition. If something is the norm then replacing that norm with helium and seeing enhanced performance isn't signal of the norm being restrictive. It's signal of helium being performance enhancing.
Highly surprising mammals didn't adapt to this,
aren't nitrogen levels the same for 100m years?
Being 10% slower is actually a huge handicap,
and seems to be something fishy with the idea we
live permanently under influence without evolving
something like biological counters.
A rabbit that is 10% slower will face a huge
evolutionary handicap.
Fish evolved to swim effectively in water, but the viscosity of water still slows them down. Adapting to deal with a problem isn't the same as completely eliminating the problem.
Perhaps the little anesthetic effect also helps us to calm down and not being hyperactive all the time? I find thinking in diffuse mode and day-dreaming very beneficent.
I'm just enjoying the image of wealthy mind-hackers filling their workspaces with a helium-oxygen atmosphere. Sure, they might be able to think nine percent faster, but will anyone take them seriously with their squeaky voices?
I wonder whether the little anesthetic effect of nitrogen also helps us to calm down and not being hyperactive all the time?! I find thinking in diffuse mode and day-dreaming very beneficent.
It concluded that the nitrogen in ambient air slightly but measurable impairs human performance compared with a non-anesthetic gas such as helium.
This seems like a massive reach. Is it not possible the body is just perceiving that something is "wrong" about its current situation while breathing helium and is activating a threat response? The study authors didn't even bother to monitor heart rate, let alone blood concentrations of adrenalin and cortisol. This might have been a neat study in 1975 but it is not nearly rigorous enough.
This could be an unfortunate oversight in an otherwise stellar document, but it biases me to question the entire outcome. If they can't even complete the abstract correctly, what other error is in this paper?
Looks like they tested nitrogen-oxygen and helium-oxygen but not nitrogen-helium. I suggest they repeat the experiment with that control case and I can recommend numerous very suitable participants for that control group.
Apparently, some divers will start feeling the narcotic effect between 20-30m. Beyond 30m, a significant amount of divers can feel the effects.
Beyond 40m is the realm of tech diving, with trimix (helium/nitrogen/oxygen) or even heliox (helium/oxygen). I know nothing about this, so I’ll let others comment.
The interesting thing about this research is that it sort of makes sense, and yet is very surprising. We’re basically continuously narked, we’re just so used to it we don’t even know.
Fun fact: the exact cause of nitrogen narcosis is not exactly understood. It is most likely the fact that at higher partial pressures nitrogen is able to enter the fatty tissues surrounding our nerves. Except for helium, no other gas exists which does not have some form narcotic effect at higher pressures.
Considering the prices of helium, this also explains why many deep divers are starting to consider rebreathers.