The anesthetic effect of air at atmospheric pressure
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-conflicted-hi...
Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery by J. Lamb is actually quite interesting.
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"
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.
Also try Buffalo Trace, it's one of my three favorite including the two you mentioned.
Would you suggest the regular Buffalo Trace or one of their (many) variations?
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.
"Were Early Modern People Perpetually Drunk? (2016) (hypotheses.org)"
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/delet...
It puts forward that the purpose of small beer was mainly because water is boring to drink all the time.
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.
Maybe this is what Oxygen Bars are actually about but nobody knows it yet.
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".
The resistance shouldn't change much whether you are 30cm in the water or 30m.
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-oxygen-concentrator.h...
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...
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
That is certainly not my experience.
Nah.
I've breathed pure oxygen under water for 10 minutes at a time at a ppO2 of 1.6 and it doesn't really do much.
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.
Hell, even NAC almost got banned recently.
It can be hard to confine helium, and its presence can make some electronics malfunction: https://www.ifixit.com/News/11986/iphones-are-allergic-to-he...
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.
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.
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%.
I assume the narcotic effect of fluorine, chlorine and bromine are basically unstudied...
“Narked” in the scuba community 100% refers to nitrogen narcosis. See the company called “Narked at 90”.
what a sheltered life I lead
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.)
And yet, argon is more narcotic than nitrogen:
It's reportedly been done very recently using a rebreather (https://gue.com/blog/n1-the-inside-story-of-the-first-ever-h...).
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...).
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.
It was a worryingly pleasant experience. Like 3 or 4 pints on a warm summer’s afternoon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Disclaimer that biological sciences aren't my strength so I'm just trying to understand what you're saying.
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.
ref: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.11481 - good overview paper, http://erewhon.superkuh.com/library/Neuroscience/Lipid%20Mem... - other papers/books on the subject.
I know some of these words!*
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.
Thanks!
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.
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.
edit: also opiate and opioid are different, i'm talking about the brain chemical, not the drug.
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.
> 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
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).
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/
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
Not loads less, above 3000m it starts getting inconvenient. But 1000-2000m my mind feels more clear and focused than at sea level.
I wonder if this is related?
I lived at 6500' for a while - that was too high.
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
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').
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.
It's just that the mountain I most usually hike on is 400m high from its sea-level base.
Would sound odd during calls, though!
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.
So would a modified cabin air mix improve the performance of pilots?
> For every increase of 100 meters, suicide rates rise by 0.4 per 100,000 people.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Divers-Adventure-Americans-Eve...
IME, too much stimulants causes hyperreflexia, but I'm not sure if it's because of a decreased reaction time.
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.
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.