Some guy sent the author an email claiming that this has happened to his brother. No way to check out this story, although I looked up the supposed name of the brother and drew a blank. Can you come up with a case that can be checked out? It would help with determining what is and is not possible.
Not every individual’s name can expect to invoke a hit on Google for that specific person. Back to my original inquiry, I was asking if it would be possible to convince the mind (subconsciously or consciously) to directly cease an unconscious process. It is acknowledged that the nocebo effect can influence the secretion of stress hormones, which is in itself an unconscious process.
That’s just the placebo effect. There’s no need to be inventing a new word for it.
Poor cite, poor article.
The author states outlandish ideas citing unnamed “studies”.
She then goes on to try and sell her book o’ BS.
When my cousin’s daughter was young, she would hold her breath when she was mad about something. She was stubborn as hell and she could hold her breath until she lost consciousness. But my cousin checked with doctors and they told her that you can’t injure yourself just by holding your breath. As the girl showed, you eventually pass out and when you do you automatically start breathing again - you can’t repress your breathing reflex when you’re unconscious. And you’ll pass out before you do yourself any damage from not breathing.
Agreed, I would say the basic assumption of this question is false or at best unsupported by evidence.
The mother of a mate of mine was got the same reassurance from her child’s doctor. Shortly afterward he managed to rupture his diaphragm from holding his breath :eek:
If it’s any conciliation, today is National Tongue Awareness Day!
ETA, I know someone will put this here if I don’t.
This happens even if there is no air to breath – like if you are underwater. Then you drown, but with your lungs still moving & attempting to breathe.
Can a psychogenic effect impair respiratory function? It’s an interesting question, even if the cited case is highly dubious. (A person in great enough mortal fear of his own death to incur a psychogenic effect probably wouldn’t go snorkelling on that day.)
If you hold your breath long enough to cause damage to yourself, you would collapse into unconsciousness long before you managed to die of it and your body would take over and start breathing again, as others have said. At that level, it’s pure brainstem function. I’m not a medical professional so I can’t be definitive, but it seems highly unlikely to me that a psychogenic effect could gain access to the brainstem and continuously block this reflex for a long enough period of time to cause death, or indeed at all.
It could however induce an involuntary hyperventilation, like in anxiety attacks, leading to a cascade of hypnocapic-hyperventilation followed by cerebral hypoxia. (Psychogenic dyspnea.) There’s a step missing from this leading to death, since you’d again fall unconscious, the body would self-regulate and the mild cerebral hypoxia generally doesn’t have any adverse effects after the episode. But it could be compounded by outside variables like a nitrogen-heavy environment, into a prolonged cerebral hypoxia, leading to unconsciousness, anoxia and death. Or being, say, underwater.
There are certain medical conditions that can complicate the picture, like Ondine’s Curse. However, people with Ondine’s Curse (properly CCHS) are apparently very unlikely to survice infanthood untreated and it’s a very rare condition in the first place.
Reminded of an old joke where a guy crept up behind a blond he fancied meeting and removed her headphones so he could get her attention. She collapsed and died. On listening to the headphones, it was, “breath in, breath out”.
I don’t think so, although the only evidence I have is that bit from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep where Roy Batty mentions that androids can hold their breath to suicide whereas in humans the vagus nerve will cut in and force you to stop holding your breath
Why would a vague ‘nocebo’ effect be blamed without first ruling out the infinitely more likely outcome that the man drowned while snorkeling?
It is said that the subject was found unconscious on the shore suffering from oxygen deprivation the day his doctor informed him that he would succumb to a terminal lung disease.
And it was said that he was doing a high risk activity, certainly very high risk for someone with terminal lung disease.
It is also said that my grandmother wore combat boots.
That’s why we rely on documentation over hearsay.
There are a few problems we need to overcome before any real answers can be found.
First, do you actually have a story where the facts are documented and beyond dispute?
In this case, you don’t even have a second hand story. You have a 4th hand story (this guy received an email from a person whose brother experienced this). Worse, no part of this can be confirmed. We can’t confirm the email exists (it’s not unreasonable to presume it does), we don’t know the person who sent the email exists, we don’t know the person told the truth about anything - having a brother, that the brother experienced anything, etc, and we don’t know the brother actually
Second, presuming this story can be validated in any of its particulars, what does that prove?
If you tell 100 million people they will die in 5 years, some small fraction will die exactly 5 years later. That doesn’t prove anything, other than the fact that some people will always die. The way science works is you have to come up with some evidence that can’t reasonably be chalked up to random chance or some other unrelated cause. “This one time, this neat thing happened” is almost always the opposite of real evidence.
Finally, what connection does it have to consciously choosing to cease breathing until death?
Even in the case you can confirm this tenuously related story is not only true but can be connected to your thesis, you’ve only gotten past the first big stretch. The next big stretch is connecting that to bodily functions in general.
Reality does not work by analogy. “This one thing that’s kinda, remotely similar to this other thing works this way, therefore <insert whatever conclusion you want>” is a poor way to go about figuring out things. It’s exactly the reasoning people used to justify all sorts of horribly incorrect things, like bloodletting or phrenology. Sure, bloodletting actually does work for a few things but not the way doctors used it back in the day and certainly not because they were operating with a correct theory.
Articles ? Woowoo articles ? Nocebo seems a little too ‘straight forward’ to require medical article. And the summary of the story given makes it sound like illogical "woowoo " stuff.
The most extremely illogical part is the ‘5 year alarm clock’.
the summary seems to say the doctor set the alarm clock to go off 5 years later,
and then it does.
Well when the doctor says ‘you are going to die in around 5 years’, its more like a jail sentence… most likely between 3 to 10, average 5…
(In science, all measurements have an error margin, and if its not a numeric assessment or at least some quality statement. )
The next illogical part is that the activity being undertaken seems quite dangerous for someone due to die from a lung disease … which gives us the ability to say that the alarm clock effect was not required.
It has been long known that suggestion can affect the unconscious mind - the placebo effect and its counterpart is an example of this - affecting levels of coristol and other hormones via suggestion. Breathing is also an unconscious function, but the placebo effect can affect unconscious function such as hormone release.
You keep repeating that as if it you think it means something. You haven’t demonstrated any possible mechanism where anything can affect the breathing reflex. It’s way down in the brain processes, and not something that can be easily modified.
It has also long been known that bloodletting releases evil humors.
The use of stock phrases like “it is said” and “it has long been known” is often the mark of a weak argument.
It’s a joke we used to tell in high school. Whenever you wanted to sound smart (or like a smart-ass) without doing any work, you insert a “it is well known that” and Bob’s your uncle. But whenever we needed to actually get a decent grade, we had to show our work. In this case, you’ve shown nothing. Just a lot of anecdotes and conjecture with no real backing.
All the evidence we have so far collected says that we cannot force ourselves to stop breathing until we die. That’s the GQ response. Anything else is conjecture, and that’s fine as it goes. But eventually conjecture has to be backed by evidence or it veers towards crank science.