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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I know the paper is lacking in evidence, but it proposes such an interesting phenomena. It's worth exploring more.

It made my mind jump to perhaps a second, potentially worse outcome of mouth breathing - seeding the lung mucosa with oral flora. That seems like it could enhance the spread and inflammation. And cause deleterious downstream impacts such as slightly increased risk of cancer, pulmonary diseases, etc.

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Note that the experimental blocks were short, in the order of a few minutes, and was mixed between both nasal and oral breathing. Now imagine that whatever cause can spread that rapidly to the brain and have a noticeable effect there. Then orally breathing a full day (which is quite common when you have a cold) would lead to total cognitive degradation. You'd need a very peculiar mechanism to explain why that wouldn't happen.

There's a massive hole in the methodology. If I tell you "do this complex mental task, oh by the way be conscious of your breathing the whole time," that is going to have impact on your capacity to focus on the task.

Really it can get that bad?

Pat Volkerding, Slackware maintainer, suffered from Actinomycosis in 2004 - quite a chilling read [0].

  > To help me avoid more tooth decay my dad bought me one of those fancy
  > rechargable electric toothbrushes that really powers away the plaque. 
  > It also creates a fine aerosol mist of plaque, and I started to wonder
  > if 4 years of using this brush had caused me to breathe in some of this
  > plaque mist and moved an infection into my lungs.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050206180243/http://www.slackw...

Wait toothbrushes are a concern?

Everything is a concern. It's not often that humanity gets it right the first time, so the trick is to be ready to make changes when new verifiable data comes to light.

Thank you for saying that. I personally always found it confusing that people at some point simply say 'I am done learning anything new' as if their current model of the world is already perfect. I might understand there is a physical memory limit, but I sincerely doubt it is even scratched for most people.

I understand the evolutionary underpinnings for it ( 'what I did got me this far did it not?' ), but it is still not a great excuse for a conscious being.

It's not as if it's a hard limit, and you become incapable of absorbing additional facts beyond a certain point. If anything, the human mind seems best adapted to ongoing learning, as it seems to store (and discard) information in terms of relational strength.

> people at some point simply say 'I am done learning anything new'

Yeah, it's not good to do that, but how is that related?

The "evolutionary underpinnings" are a sound rationale, not an excuse. Not for completely eschewing new information but being conservative in making changes.

Poor oral hygiene is linked to heart disease too

And dementia

I knew a guy once who had very serious heart trouble after a teeth-cleaning. This is not even an unknown phenomenon -- cleaning your teeth does make small wounds in your gums, and oral bacteria can get into your bloodstream.

Dental procedures and even tooth brushing increase blood bacteria levels. In addition to aerosolizing, they also reach circulation through gingival lesions caused by the procedure. Once in the blood, they can colonize the heart and cause endocarditis.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.107.7...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12212870/

I quickly learned to keep my mouth closed while brushing my teeth.

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