How I Held My Breath for 17 Minutes TED Talk | David Blaine

you as a magician I try to create images that make people stop and think I also try to challenge myself to do things that doctors say are not possible I was buried alive in New York City in a coffin buried alive in a coffin in April 1999 for a week I lived there with nothing but water and it ended up being so much fun that I decided I could pursue doing more of these things the next one is I froze myself in a block of ice for three days and three nights in New York City that one was way more difficult than I had expected the one after that I stood on top of a hundred foot pillar for 36 hours I began to hallucinate so hard that the buildings that were behind me started to look like big animal heads so next I went to London in London I lived in a glass box for 44 days with nothing but water it was for me one of the most difficult things I've ever done but it was also the most beautiful there were so many skeptics especially the press in London that they started flying cheeseburgers on helicopters around my box to tempt me so I felt very validated when the New England Journal Medicine actually used the research for science my next pursuit was I wanted to see how long I could go without breathing like how long I could survive with nothing not even air I didn't realize that it would become the most amazing journey of my life there's a young magician I was obsessed with Houdini and his underwater challenges so I began early on competing against the other kids seeing how long I could stay underwater why they went up and down to breathe you know five times I stayed under on one breath by the time I was a teenager I was able to hold my breath for three minutes and 30 seconds I would later find out that was Houdini's personal record in 1987 I heard of a story about a boy that fell through ice and was trapped under a river he was underneath not breathing for 45 minutes when the rescue workers came they resuscitated him and there was no brain damage his core temperature had dropped to 77 degrees as a magician I think everything is possible and I think if something is done by one person that can be done by others I started to think if the boy could survive without breathing for that long there must be a way that I could do it so I met with the top neurosurgeon and I asked him how long is it possible to go without breathing like how long could I go without air and he said to me that anything over six minutes you have a serious risk of hypoxic brain damage so I took that as a challenge basically my first try I figured that I could do something similar and I created a water tank and I filled it with ice and freezing cold water and I stayed inside of that water tank hoping my temper my core temperature would start to drop and I was shivering and my first attempt to hold my breath I couldn't even last a minute so I realized that was completely not going to work so I went to talk to a doctor friend and I asked him what how could I go how could I do that I want to hold my breath for a really long time how could it be done and he said David you're a magician create the illusion of not breathing it will be much easier so he came up with this idea of creating a rebreather with a co2 scrubber which was basically a tube from Home Depot with the balloons duct-taped to it that he thought we could put inside of me and somehow be able to circulate the air and Bri breathe with this thing in me that this is a little hard to watch but this is that attempt so that clearly wasn't going to work then I actually started thinking about liquid breathing there's a chemical that's called per flu Bron and it's so high in oxygen levels that in theory you could breathe it so I got my hands on that chemical filled the sink up with it and stuck my face in the sink and tried to breathe that in which is really impossible it's basically like trying to breathe as a doctor said while having an elephant standing on your chest so that idea disappeared then I started thinking would it be possible to hook up a heart-lung bypass machine and have a surgery where it was a tube going into my artery and then appear to not breathe while they were oxygenating my blood which was another insane idea obviously then I thought about the craziest idea of all the ideas to actually do it to actually try to hold my breath past the point that doctors would consider you brain-dead so I started researching into pearl divers you know because they go down for four minutes on one breath and when I was researching Pro Bevers I found the world of freediving it was the most amazing thing that I ever discovered pretty much there's many different aspects to free diving there's there's depth records where people go as deep as I can and then there's static apnea that's holding your breath as long as you can in one place without moving that was the one that I studied the first thing that I learned is when you're holding your breath you should never move at all that wastes energy and that depletes oxygen and it builds up co2 in your blood so I learned never to move and I learned how to slow my heart rate down I had to remain perfectly still and just relax and think that I wasn't in my body and just control that and then I learned how to purge purging is basically hyperventilating you blow in and out you do that you get lightheaded you get tingling and you're really ridding your body of co2 so when you hold your breath it's infinitely easier then I learned that you have to take a huge breath if you just hold it relax and never let any air out and just hold and relax through all the pain every morning this is four months I would wake up and the first thing that I would do is I would hold my breath for out of 52 minutes I would hold my breath for 44 minutes so basically what that means is I would purge I'd breathe really hard for a minute and then I would hold immediately after for five and a half minutes then I would breathe again for a minute purging as hard as I can then immediately after I would hold again for five and a half minutes I would repeat this process eight times in a row at a fifty two minutes you're only breathing for eight minutes at the end of that you're completely fried your brain you feel like you're walking around in a daze and you have these awful headaches basically I'm not the best person to talk to when I'm doing that stuff I started learning about the world-record holder his name is Tom Zenith and this guy is perfectly built for holding his breath he's six foot four he's a hundred and sixty pounds and his total lung capacity is twice the size of an average person I'm six foot one in fat it will say big-boned I had to drop 50 pounds in three months so everything that I put into my body I considered as medicine every bit of food was exactly what it was for its nutritional value I ate really small controlled portions throughout the day and I started to really adapt my body the thinner I was the longer I was able to hold my breath and by eating so well and training so hard my resting heart rate dropped to 38 beats per minute which is lower than most Olympic athletes in four months of training I was able to hold my breath fro for seven minutes I wanted to try holding my breath everywhere I wanted to try it in the most extreme situations to see if I could slow my heart rate down under duress I decided that I was going to break the world record live on prime-time television the world record was eight minutes and 58 seconds held by Tom Z the sec guy with the whale lungs I told you about I assumed that I could put a water tank at Lincoln Center and if I stayed there a week not eating I would get comfortable in that situation and I would slow my metabolism which I was sure would help me hold my breath longer than I had been able to do it I was completely wrong I entered the sphere a week before the scheduled air day and I thought everything seemed to be on track two days before my big breath-hold attempt for the record the producers of my television special thought that just watching somebody holding their breath and almost drowning is too boring for television so I had to add handcuffs while holding my breath to escape from this was a critical mistake because of the movement I was wasting oxygen and by seven minutes I had gone into these awful convulsions by 708 I started to black out and by 7 minutes and 30 seconds they had to pull my body out and bring me back I had failed on every level so naturally the only way out of the slump that I could think of was I decided to call Oprah I told her that I wanted to up the ante and hold my breath longer than any human being ever had this was a different record this is a pure o2 static apnea record the guinness had set the world record at 13 minutes so basically you breathe pure o2 first oxygenating your body flushing out co2 and you're able to hold much longer I realized that my real competition was the beaver in January of OE Oprah gave me four months to prepare and train so I would sleep in a hypoxic tent and every night a hypoxic tent is a tent that simulates altitude at 15,000 feet so it's like base camp Everest what that does is you start building up the red blood cell count in your body which helps you carry oxygen better every morning again after getting out of that tent your brain is completely wiped out my first attempt on pure o2 I was able to go up to 15 minutes so it was a pretty big success the neurosurgeon pulled me out of the water because in his mind of 15 minutes your brain has done your your brain did so he pulled me up and I was fine there was one person there that was definitely not impressed it was my ex-girlfriend while I was breaking the record underwater for the first time she was sifting through my blackberry checking all my messages my brother had a picture of it I then announced that I was going to go for C this is record publicly and what he did in response as he went on Regis and Kelly and broke his old record then his main competitor went out and broke his record so he suddenly pushed the record up to 16 minutes and 32 seconds which was three minutes longer than I had prepared you know it was longer than the record now I wanted to get the science times to document this I wanted to get them to do a piece on it so I did what any person seriously pursuing scientific advancement would do I walked into the New York Times offices and did card tricks to everybody so I don't know if it was the magic or the lore of the Cayman Islands but John Tierney flew down and did a piece on the seriousness of breath-holding while he was there I tried to impress him of course and I did a dive down to 160 feet which is like you know basically the height of a 16-story building and as I was coming up I blacked out underwater which is really dangerous I tell you drown luckily Kirk had seen me and he swung over and pulled me up so I started full focus I completely trained to get my breath hold time up for what I needed to do but there was no way to prepare for the live television aspect of it being on Oprah but in practice I would do it facedown floating on the pool but for TV they wanted me to be upright so they could see my face basically the other problem was the the suit was so buoyant that they had to strap my feet and to keep me from floating up so I had to use my legs to hold my feet into the straps that were loose which is a real problem for me that made me extremely nervous raising the heart rate then what they also did was which we never do before is there was a heart rate monitor and it was right next to the sphere so every time my heart would be I'd hear the beep you know the ticking really loud which is making me norm more nervous and there's no way to slow my heart rate down so normally I would start at 38 beats per minute and while holding my breath it would drop to 12 beats per minute which is pretty unusual this time it started at 120 beats and it never went down I spent the first five minutes underwater desperately trying to slow my heart rate down I was just sitting there thinking I've gotta sew this down I'm gonna fail I'm gonna fail and I was getting more nervous and the heart rate just kept going up and up all the way up to 150 beads basically it's the same thing that created my downfall Lincoln Center was a waste of o2 when I made it to the halfway mark at eight minutes I was 100% certain that I was not going to be able to make this there was no way for me to do it so I figured Oprah had dedicated an hour to doing this breath-hold thing if I had cracked earlier it would be a whole show but how depressed I am so so I figured I'm better off just fighting and staying there until i black out at least and they can pull me out and take care of me and all I kept pushing to 10 minutes at 10 minutes you start getting all these really strong tingling sensations and your fingers and toes and I knew that that was blood shunting when the blood rushes away from your extremities to provide oxygen to your vital organs at 11 minutes I started feeling throbbing sensations in my legs and my lips started to feel really strange at minute 12 I started to have ringing in my ears and I started to feel my arm going numb and I'm a hypochondriac and I remember arm numb means heart attacks I started to really get really paranoid then at 13 minutes maybe because of the hypochondria my life I started feeling pains all over my chest it was it was awful it 14 minutes I had these awful contractions like this urge to breathe at 15 minutes I was a suffering major Oh to deprivation to the heart and I started having a schema to the heart my heartbeat would go from 120 to 50 to 150 to 40 to 20 to 150 again it would skip a beat it would start it would stop and I felt all this and I was sure that I was gonna have a heart attack so at 16 minutes what I did is I slid my feet out because I knew that if I did go out if I did have a heart attack they'd have to jump into the body take my feet out before pulling me up so I was really nervous so I let my feet out and I started floating to the top and I didn't take my head out and I was just floating there waiting for my heart to stop just waiting they had doctors with the penis sitting there waiting and then suddenly I hear screaming and I think there's some weird thing that I had died or something had happened and then I realized that I had made it to 1632 so with the energy of everybody that was there I decided to keep pushing and I went to 17 minutes and four seconds as though that wasn't enough what I did immediately after I went to quest labs and had them take every blood sample that they could the test for everything and to see where my levels were so the doctors could use it once again I also didn't want anybody to question it I had the world record and I wanted to make sure it was legitimate so I get to New York City the next day and this kid walks up to me I'm walking out of the Apple Store this kid walks up to me he's like yo D I'm like yeah he said if you really held your breath that long why'd you come out of the water dry and that's my life so but as a magician I try to show things to people that seem impossible and I think magic whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards is pretty simple it's practice it's training and it's Express it's practice it's training and experimenting while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be and that's that's what magic is to me so thank you you

Channel: David Blaine

Views: 1,486,379

Rating: 4.859633 out of 5

Keywords: Ted Talk, David BLAINE, magic, breathhold, World Record (Literature Subject), Guinness World Records (Award Category)

Id: UX_Ev94t2nc

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2013