Recently I have watched a TED talk by David Blaine on how he held his breath for 17 minutes. Blaine is a well-known magician from New York who always tries to go beyond the human body limits in order to amaze people.
Throughout the TED talk, Blaine describes his journey to trying to increase the amount of time he can go without breathing. When he first started doing magic, he would usually do tricks where he would survive in closed spaces with only water for several days and live under certain conditions which would hurt the brain. He decided that his next challenge was with breathing, so he trained to break the world record for holding his breath, which included studying the people who have lived the longest without breathing and getting brain damage, studying pearl divers, and undergoing a diet to make him lose 50 pounds in three months. He kept increasing his capacity up until he finally was able to reach his goal.
What amazed me, though, is that despite thinking about doing it, he did not take shortcuts and create the illusion of holding his breath. The methods he was going to use, though, would not have worked as well because they would have been exposing, and people would notice, so he ended up just training to hold his breath. This amazed me since he very much could take the magician route, but ended up trying to exceed his limits anyways.
This talk was inspirational that you could achieve something if you work for it. His way of drawing attention and amazing people with magic and exceeding bodily limits shows what people are drawn to when wondering about what we are capable of.
