Mouthbreathing was also making me dumber. A recent Japanese study showed that rats who had their nostrils obstructed and were forced to breathe through their mouths developed fewer brain cells and took twice as long to make their way through a maze than nasal-breathing controls. Another Japanese study in humans from 2013 found that mouthbreathing delivered a disturbance of oxygen to the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with ADHD. Nasal breathing had no such effects.
The ancient Chinese were onto it as well. “The breath inhaled through the mouth is called ‘Ni Ch’i, adverse breath,’ which is extremely harmful,” states a passage from the Tao. “Be careful not to have the breath inhaled through the mouth.”
As I lie in bed tossing and turning, fighting the urge to run to the bathroom again, I’m trying to focus on the positive, and am reminded of a skull from Marianna Evans’s collection that offered a much-needed dose of hope.
* * *
• • •
It was morning, and Evans was seated in front of an oversize computer monitor in the administrative office of her orthodontics practice, about a half hour west of downtown Philadelphia. With white walls and white-tiled floors, the place looked futuristic. It was the opposite of the tan-stucco strip-mall blocks with ferns, goldfish tanks, and Robert Doisneau prints of all the dental offices I’d been to. Evans, I learned, ran a different kind of practice.
She brought up two images on a computer monitor, one of an ancient skull from the Morton Collection, and the other of a young girl, a new patient. I’ll call her Gigi. Gigi was about seven in the photo. Her teeth jutted from the top of her gums, outward, inward, and in all directions. There were dark circles under her eyes; her lips were chapped and open as if she were sucking on an imaginary Popsicle. She suffered from chronic snoring, sinusitis, and asthma. She’d just started developing allergies to foods, dust, and pets.
Gigi grew up in a wealthy household. She followed the Food Guide Pyramid, got plenty of outdoor exercise, had her immunizations, took vitamins D and C, and had no illnesses growing up. And yet, here she was. “I see patients like this all day,” said Evans. “They are all the same.”
And here we are. Ninety percent of children have acquired some degree of deformity in their mouths and noses. Forty-five percent of adults snore occasionally, and a quarter of the population snores constantly. Twenty-five percent of American adults over 30 choke on themselves because of sleep apnea; and an estimated 80 percent of moderate or severe cases are undiagnosed. Meanwhile, the majority of the population suffers from some form of breathing difficulty or resistance.
We’ve found ways to clean up our cities and to tame or kill off so many of the diseases that destroyed our ancestors. We’ve become more literate, taller, and stronger. On average, we live three times longer than people in the Industrial Age. There are now seven and a half billion humans on the planet—a thousand times more people than there were 10,000 years ago.
And yet we’ve lost touch with our most basic and important biological function.
Evans painted a depressing picture. And the irony wasn’t lost on me as I sat in a sparkling clinic looking at one modern face after another and comparing them with the ideal form and perfect teeth of Samuel Morton’s specimens, which he derided as “Australians and degraded Hottentots.” At one point I scooted closer and saw my reflection in the monitor glass—that mangle of disjointed bones, the sloping jaw, stuffy nose, and mouth too small to fit all its teeth. You fools, I imagined that ancient skull saying. And for a moment, I swear, it looked like it was laughing.
But Evans hadn’t invited me to see her research just to lament the present; her obsession with tracing the decline of human breathing is just a starting point. She’d studied it for years, entirely at her own expense, because she wants to help. She and her colleague, Kevin Boyd, are using the hundreds of measurements they’ve taken from ancient skulls to build a new model of airway health for modern humans. They are part of a burgeoning group of pulmonauts exploring novel therapies in breathing, lung expansion, orthodontics, and airway development. Their goal is to help return Gigi, me, and everyone else to our more perfect, ancient forms—the way we were before it all went haywire.
On the computer screen, Evans pulled up another photo. It was Gigi again, but in this shot there were no dark circles, none of the sallow skin or drooping lids. Her teeth were straight and her face was broad and glowing. She was nasal breathing again and no longer snored. Her allergies and other respiratory problems had all but disappeared. The photograph was taken two years after the first, and Gigi looked transformed.
The same thing happened with other patients—both adults and children—who’d regained the ability to breathe properly: their slack-jawed and narrowed faces morphed back into a more natural configuration. They saw their high blood pressure drop, depression abate, headaches disappear.
Harvold’s monkeys recovered, too. After two years of forced mouthbreathing, he removed the silicone plugs. Slowly, surely, the animals relearned how to breathe through their noses. And slowly, surely, their faces and airways remodeled: jaws moved forward and facial structure and airways morphed back into their wide and natural state.
Six months after the experiment ended, the monkeys looked like monkeys again, because they were breathing normally again.
* * *
—
Back in my bedroom, staring out at the shadow play of branches in the window, I’m hoping that I too can reverse whatever damage I’d done in the last ten days, and the past four decades. I’m hoping I can relearn to breathe the way my ancestors breathed. I suppose I’ll see soon enough.
Tomorrow morning, the plugs come out.
Part Two
THE LOST ART AND SCIENCE OF BREATHING
Three
NOSE
“You look like shit,” says Dr. Nayak.
It’s early afternoon and I’m back at the Stanford Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery Center. I’m splayed out on the examination chair while Nayak nudges an endoscope up my right nostril. The smooth desert dunes I journeyed through ten days ago look like they’ve been hit by a hurricane. I’ll skip the details; let’s just say my nasal cavity is a mess.
“Now your favorite part,” says Nayak, chuckling. Before I sneeze or can consider running away, he grabs the wire brush and pushes it a few inches into my head. “It’s pretty soupy in there,” he says, sounding somewhat pleased. He repeats with the left nostril, places the gunk-covered RNA brushes into a test tube, then scoots me out of the way.
For the past week and a half I’d been waiting for this moment. I’d anticipated removing these plugs and tape and cotton to be a celebratory scene involving high-fives and nasal sighs of relief. I could breathe like a healthy human again!