Hey all, this podcast was just released with James Nestor who is a journalist who writes books on breathing and other relevant topics. He highlights how even simple things like preference for nasal breathing even while exercising, and doing simple breathing exercises like taking 30 deep breaths at a time (through your nose, at 6-12 breaths per minute)) can vastly improve our long term health. He offers healthy skepticism to the Yogi new agey language too, so I can relate a lot more to it.
Breathing and circulation are essential topics to understand while using the HEG as this is how the magic happens, while the HEG mainly helps you build the association with breathing to your cortex and varying mental states. If there's any trick I'm pulling here, it's simply getting you to breathe and circulate blood in your head properly by your own volition, and build resilience to stress and other things in your mental state that might mess with or even damage it - which will help you be healthy and recover. I can only speak in generalities about these things as I'm not the expert and I cannot ethically make medical claims, but our understanding of this whole system is evolving yet founded in ancient intuitions. Volitional breathing for improving brain blood flow (and every other function) is a well explored topic and common in a lot of care plans like for kids with autism or panic disorders, yet suspiciously missing in so much other psychiatric care - while it's one of the very first, easiest, and most guaranteed mental health interventions we can do. It's one of the first things we all learn to do as kids to not be overwhelmed, but not all of us learn to do it properly if at all - and most of us others simply develop an unspoken intuition for this so it's not exactly articulated often enough.
I personally believe the longer we have bad breathing and circulation, the more we rob our brain of ability to develop, adapt, and heal - especially later in life, which will have huge negative impacts on our intelligence and ability to be present. It's as basic as staying hydrated. It's not something we can see, however, only feel, so HRV and HEG biofeedback are really really important tools to teach people especially later in life if they have never conditioned their breathing before and are not tuned in. The younger we learn, the better.
Next week I will have an update on the hardware, with a full breakdown of 3 different prototypes I've been testing and what to expect in August for your developer kits if you ordered them. I've got a date with an electrical engineer coming up so after that I'll have enough interesting stuff to share.
FYI I'm also the liason for this crowdfunding project which is soon to begin: https://crowdsupply.com/neuroidss/freeeeg32.
I am handling production, distribution, and outreach for Dmitry who designed the board as a freesource board, so everything's going through me. I'm also working on EEG solutions and he's taught me everything, and I believe in collaboration instead of competition so I want to help him get established the same way I was able to get established in this space and keep some food in my mouth while I basically live like an ascetic engineer monk. It would have been nice to have decided to do all this after a 10 or 20 year career so I had more capital and experience to throw in, but time's of the essence and the system won't do it for me so I'm figuring it out all at once, lol.