The human neuroendocrine system has changed very little since the time of cave people. Yet today we are likely to receive more stimulation in one day than our ancestors did in their entire lifetime.
He has, as one advertising lackey puts it, gotten rich selling people air that's fresher' than the stinky stuff outside. If a recent proliferation of real-life courses, books and online search interest is anything to go by, the act of getting that air into one's lungs is also now commodified. Online and in-person breathwork sessions now abound, some charging hundreds of dollars to teach participants a skill most have already acquired as a prerequisite for life: how to breathe.
"As we get older, the immune system is shifting away from good inflammation," which is the body's short-term, acute response to fend off injury or infection and promote healing, explains Dr. Thomas Marron, one of the researchers leading the new study. Marron directs early phase clinical trials at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
When surgeons removed a 33-year-old woman's right lung as part of her cancer treatment in 1995, they expected a dramatic and permanent reduction in her breathing power. But that's not what happened. Instead, her remaining lung pulled off a trick that scientists had long thought impossible in humans: it grew new tissue, and lots of it. Over the next 15 years, her left lung compensated for the loss of its partner by nearly doubling in volume and growing millions of new air sacs, called alveoli.
