6 ms·
The yogic claim of voluntary control over the heart beat (1973)
- e40 11y agoI'm unfamiliar with some of the terms in the short article. Can someone do a ELI5 for this? What did he do to his heart beat?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 11y agoHe appeared to have stopped his heart for close to 8 days when buried in an underground pit.
- angst_ridden 11y agoI'd like to see the same experiment performed, but audited by Penn & Teller and/or Derren Brown.
- oberstein 11y agoDon't forget James Randi.
- imglorp 11y agoRandi doesn't really expose frauds in a dramatic way. He infers how such tricks could be done, sets up an experiment that will prevent such tricks, and then lets the frauds fall on their own sword. They'll either "have a bad day" or decline. To date, no one has claimed the foundation's million dollar prize.
- Florin_Andrei 11y agoPenn & Teller can be surprisingly narrow-minded sometimes. I'd prefer someone with fewer preconceptions. Ideally a combo team of scientists and stage magicians.
- cjensen 11y agoPer Occam's Razor, the Yogi disconnected his EKG, got hypothermia, and lied when he claimed he didn't drink water. Is there a culture that doesn't fall for mystical cons?
- suneilp 11y agoThey ruled out disconnecting the EKG. I'm still dubious about surviving without water.
- jmount 11y agoThey didn't. Just because one group of observers didn't find the trick doesn't mean there was no trick.
- khed 11y agoFair point, but at what level of evidence would you personally say there was no trick?
- nilkn 11y agoI'd want a combination of video evidence along with a complete record of the EKG readings interpreted by a team of cardiac electrophysiologists.
- jmount 11y agoWay more than "I don't think they disconnected the EKG because I bet we would have seen some electrical noise." The authors wanted to be fooled, else they had no article.
- phaemon 11y agoA quick google suggests you can survive longer than 8 days without water, if you're not moving or eating.
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
- ilitirit 11y agoReminds me of the story of Prahlad Jani. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prahlad_Jani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prahlad_Jani
- ilitirit 11y agoReminds me of the story of Prahlad Jani. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prahlad_Jani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prahlad_Jani
- djtriptych 11y agoI'm a practicing yogi and surprised myself recently in the hospital (I ate some bad food on a trip to South America). I was in a hospital bed attached to a heart rate monitor for a few hours, and I could, while conscious, consistently bring my heart rate under 50 bpm (which would set off an alarm at the nurse station). I believe I got down to 46. The alarm was appropriate, as this resting heart rate likely gets me to the high reaches of the 99th percentile [1]. I could do this by practicing a fairly technical breathing technique - basically opening up the channels of breath by joining inhalation and exhalation. Still, I was able to convince myself that by practicing a very specific relaxation technique, I could lower my heart rate enough to scare nurses. I'm standing while typing this and my thumb-to-wrist test has me right around normal (72bpm). So, from my perspective, parts of this seem reasonable. I think a true master (I've only been doing this a few years) may well be able to continuously regulate his heart to quite low levels. I've often mused that yoga is a hack of some of your body's autonomic processes. A flatline seems unrealistic even to me, but I'm sure curious about what benefits there might be in this technique. [1]: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr041.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr041.pdf
- cjensen 11y ago"Resting State" is a description of a normal, non-active person who is awake. The resting mind is still pretty active. Calming yourself down further is entirely possible, so it is not particularly noteworthy that you achieved 99% percentile.
- djtriptych 11y agoI think I'm suggesting that the ability to "calm oneself down further" varies tremendously between individuals.
- sandworm101 11y agoThis was 40+ years ago. If such things were actually possible, with the advance of information technology we should see more, not less, of these accomplishments recorded. We should see cellphone footage from every angle of yogis who can fly. We should have ground-penetrating radar and webcam thermal imaging of those burying themselves. There is a line in the movie Close Encounters about how car accidents are real but had never been filmed (the point being that a lack of footage does not mean UFOs are not real). That was 1977. We now have millions more cameras and plenty of recorded car accidents because car accidents are in fact real. Conversely, bigfoot and UFO footage has all but disappeared with the increased numbers of cameras. Bigfoot is not real. Neither are these superhuman yogis. No doubt they can survive longer in harsh environments than the average person, but they cannot violate the laws of physics. If they could, we would rewrite those laws and hand them noble prizes for their work.
- chm 11y agoWe can push this further and expect your "reality test" to become practically useless some time in the next 50 years. That is, when no matter how well you analyze a video/picture, you can not tell if it is CG or not. What happens when, in the next 150 years say, one cannot identify with appreciable probability [1] whether someone is human or not? [1]: À la Turing test, but with a humanoid robot.
- sandworm101 11y agoSomething standing in front of me that cannot be scientifically proven not to be human, would be a human. A robot that accurate down to the microscopic may be a synthetically-grown human but nevertheless still a human being. CGI will always be behind the curve. Science requires repeatability by independent researchers. A CGI hoax cannot survive independent footage of the event. So CGI cannot survive scientific scrutiny. It can certainly survive fake scrutiny (see viral vids) but not real investigation by people looking for the hoax.
- EGreg 11y agoI think all our current systems (democracy, laws, courts, basic trust) rely on human level attackers who can't adapt quickly enough to beat the system every time. But I think that in the future many of these assumptions will be overturned and our systems will literally be fooled by AI. Your expectations of what AI will not be able to produce via "hacking" our systems and expectations will be far surpassed. And then what do we do? Simple short term example: how do our current political systems prevent the proliferation of rogue drones programmed by completely anonymous individuals to wreak havoc? Or computer viruses? We are just relying on the absence of a capable adversary, same as with security by obscurity.
- maxxxxx 11y agoHere is another one from Swami Rama: http://www.swamij.com/pdf/swami-rama-beyond-biofeedback.pdf http://www.swamij.com/pdf/swami-rama-beyond-biofeedback.pdf
- chromaton 11y agoMy wife suggested another explanation for this: his heart rate sped up so much that it overwhelmed the ECG sensors. This is consistent with the later diagnosis of hypothermia. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15617296 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15617296).
- jtriangle 11y agoThat's a good theory. Wife her again. so, he sped his heart up somehow to the point where he could disconnect the leads without any disruption? Also, how would someone go about faking tachycardia?
- hyperion2010 11y agoI have a cousin who nearly died from a bleeding ulcer. He likes to tell the story of how he would mess with the nurses on call by ramping his heart rate when they left the room to make the alarms go off and then ramping it back down when they all came running. Could be a big fish story, but to tell you the truth until someone does good science on this the jury is out.