James Nestor Quotes

[S]omething happened. ...[I]t was as if I'd been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else. It happened in an instant. ...I had somehow sweated through my clothes as if I'd just run a marathon.

<nowiki>[</nowiki>] was able, on command, to make his heart beat 300 times a minute. ...[I]t was so fast, they were looking at the EKG readout, and they said, "He's stopped his heart." Then they looked... a little closer and said "No, it's beating 300 times a minute." ...[T]hen he would snap out of it.

Back in the 60s... John Lilly had a lab... dedicated to solving the dolphin communication problem...

Other than ... freediving is the most dangerous adventure sport in the world.

The whales welcomed them into their pods, started shooting them with echolocation to figure out what they were, and then started shooting them with... communication clicks. ...[T]his lasted for a series of days ...

If you were to take [a billiard ball]... and... imagine just pushing it inside your head, that's about the volume of your nose and all your sinus cavities. ...[T]hey even stretch out above your eyes... [T]hey call it the because it looks exactly like a seashell.

He... had dolphin English language immersion workshops... where... an intern [would] grant dolphins sexual favors if they learned English words, and this... worked.

"There are as many ways to breath as there are foods to eat," said one... instructor... Another diver told me that some methods of breathing will nourish our brains... others hasten our death.

[I]n many ways, rocks at the bottom of the deep sea, buried under a mile of Earth’s crust, or covered in bird crap on aren’t inanimate objects at all. They are undulating, "breathing" systems crammed with organisms so tiny and metabolizing so slowly that nobody ever noticed.
Most researchers never bothered. Seeking out extreme life requires traveling to some of Earth’s most far-flung and miserable environments. Only a handful of microbiologists and geologists have had the will, fortitude, and resources to endure weeks in the triple-digit heat within African mines, or months in the frozen expanses of Antarctica, or years sifting through the polluted oil fields of to find answers.

If you compare the ocean to the human body... current exploration... is equivalent to snapping a photograph of a finger...

Truebridge just dove thirty stories... all on one lungfull of air... The pressure... is more than ten times that at the surface, strong enough to crush a Coke can. At thirty feet. the lungs collapse to hald their normal size; at three hundred feet they shrink to the size of two baseballs. ...The dives don't look forced... as if they all really belong down there. As if we all do.

During the three minutes beneath the surface... the body bears only a passing resemblance to its terrestrial form and function. The ocean changes us physically and psychically.

[Y]our body wants to be in balance... the right amount of CO₂ and oxygen for optimum delivery, and that's what the nose helps you to do.

[B]reathing... allows us these levers into systems that we can't otherwise control. ...[T]he is supposed to be beyond our control. ...When you breath a certain way, you can influence ...functions and you can start taking control of these other elements of your body, as Wim is showing... [N]ot only the nervous system, but with immune function. All of this was supposed to be impossible until he showed up and said "...test me"...

We're born of the ocean. ...At the fifth week of a fetus's development, its heart has two chambers, a characteristic shared by fish.