Takes on Diving Physiology & Psychology
I had use my blog over the last few to publish on a number of topics, with underwater photography and videography being my most popular subjects. I have also written about diving physiology, and just recently had an excellent guest post on diving psychology. Some of these posts are a bit older, but still hold up in what I argue in my opinion; I thought it’d be a good idea to bring them together in one spot.
Firstly I want to start with a guest post by my friend Marco who discusses the psychology of muck diving. Why dive in sandy plains next to beautiful and complex coral reefs? What can we expect, and how should we manage these expectations?
This next post discusses the NEDU study which compared bubble/gas diffusion deco algorithms. This study drew quite some attention, and made a lot of technical divers re-consider their deco profiles. It’s a good idea, of course, to follow the current research in a field, and act according to its results, but I think a few aspects of this (excellent!) study were misunderstood by folks who, frankly, are not used to reading and parsing scientific papers (or who didn’t even read the study?). Some of the aspects of the study are done in a part of parameter space not really relevant for “recreational” (= non military, high exertion) tech diving.
I think I made some valid points; when I posted the blog post on some tech diver forums, a lot of people got really agitated; “How can I write about this if prominent tech divers have written about it before?” Lol. Some of these folks seemed to be more responsive to authority than to argument. Not how I roll.
And another post about decompression diving physiology, looking at the hypothesis that deco stress affects endothelia in a specific way:
Tech Diving Journal Club – The at-depth endothelial dysfunction hypothesis
This last post is meant in a somewhat comical way, since bodily functions are – for some odd reason – funny. But, at the same time, situations arise where one has to throw up, … , underwater, and it can be a REAL challenge when doing it for the first time. This is not a polite topic, and hence the trendy scuba life-style blogs skip it, and it’s not a topic for serious medical research either, so I think my post really fills a niche where actual information about a real-world challenge in diving is needed:
I also put a video with diving physiology on YouTube. The occasion was the bubble ring blowing world record (!) set by my friend Emil, who could only set this record due to his amazing ability to hold his breath. How could he train to get to this level? What changes in brain circuitry did probably occur? I can only speculate, but it’s speculation based on my neuroscience background. Listen to me here:
