Just completed my deep (40m/120ft) diver certification. A significant amount of the course was focused on nitrogen narcosis, and how to handle/detect it.
Apparently, some divers will start feeling the narcotic effect between 20-30m. Beyond 30m, a significant amount of divers can feel the effects.
Beyond 40m is the realm of tech diving, with trimix (helium/nitrogen/oxygen) or even heliox (helium/oxygen). I know nothing about this, so I’ll let others comment.
The interesting thing about this research is that it sort of makes sense, and yet is very surprising. We’re basically continuously narked, we’re just so used to it we don’t even know.
Fun fact: the exact cause of nitrogen narcosis is not exactly understood. It is most likely the fact that at higher partial pressures nitrogen is able to enter the fatty tissues surrounding our nerves. Except for helium, no other gas exists which does not have some form narcotic effect at higher pressures.
Considering the prices of helium, this also explains why many deep divers are starting to consider rebreathers.
Your comment about being continuously narked reminded me how in early human history people relied on low-alcohol beer as a safe water supply. So back then it was a double-whammy.
As far as I understand, historically, alcoholic beverages were primarily invented and used as a water disinfectant. Rum was used in British navy to disinfect fresh water in barrels. Wine was used to dilute it in water till the 20th century. Fun fact, in ancient Greece people who drank pure wine (not diluting it in water) were considered alcoholics and could be publicly denounced. Beer was used as a typical beverage accompanying a meal in many populations (a sandwich with a beer was the closest analogy to the "fast food"). It appears that it is only recently that we have started to consume alcohol for pleasure.
I'm not sure I buy your claim that rum was ever used to 'disinfect' fresh water on British Navy ships. The 'grog' mix they used was not of sufficient ABV to disinfect the water, as it was handed out at a 4:1 ratio of water:rum. It was moreso about making the daily rum ration difficult to hoard, and much more efficient to transport than beer or wine.
Grog was at least 10% alcohol, plus lime juice. Navy rum was 65% or 130 proof. That's more than enough to inhibit most waterborne diseases such as cholera (inhibited in wine at 6.25% abv, though wine has tannins and phenols).
Yikes, I just checked, and Captain Morgan's is 35% Alcohol. I'm aware of Bacardi 151 (75.5% alcohol) which is like fire water to me. Can't imagine drinking something so concentrated regularly.
You can't judge from Bacardi. It's bottom-shelf, young, and pretty rough. I find it unpleasant to drink neat even at 80 proof. A high-quality, aged rum at 130 proof will be plenty fiery, but not as bad as Bacardi 151 diluted to 130 proof.
Of course, the sailors probably didn't drink anything terribly high-end.
I concur, I tried to acquire the taste for 151 in college and even after 4 years of earnest and consistent effort it did not get better. Similar experiments with Everclear and overproof grappa were also unsuccessful.
I would not recommend any of these if one is interested in a pleasant drinking experience.
Lately I've been finding Bourbon to be enjoyable. Woodford Reserve and Bulleit are well-priced and good introductions in my opinion.
If the very elaborate still in a neighbours garage is anything to go by, gin, limoncello and various others can be made this way too. 10+ bubble plates and away he goes.
In my high school days, we used it for Jell-O shots and drunk watermelons. Probably should have used vodka but ever clear was more bang/buck. I remember taking a shot of it once as a group “dare” type situation. It was as awful as you would guess
I've never drunk it. I don't like high proof alcohol.
Once I worked in a very informal lab and we were always looking for alternatives to buying industrial chemicals. I was working with optics, and Everclear came up as a good alternative to denatured alcohol or isopropyl alcohol. My friend who ran a microscope lab said it was pure enough to clean optics... however, since it was illegal to buy in California, we had a friend pick it up in Arizona and drop it off with us.
We put it in the flammable storage cabinet with a label saying it was 95% alcohol. Once during a lab inspection we tried to explain, but the inspector just said "yes, I went to college"
Why would everclear be better than denaturated alcohol? Usually (I live in Europe btw) denaturated alcol is cheaper and has same proof of drinkable liquids.
Good solvent for shellac as well, without the nasty smell and headache from denatured alcohol fumes. Costs more though, since it’s sold and taxed for consumption.
I can't practically get everclear since I live in California, where it's illegal. I use 99% IPA for shellac, it's not denatured but you wouldn't want to drink it anyway.
If I remember correctly, the lower ranking navy members weren't even allowed access to the strong stuff. Only the officers who had to dilute it before giving it to the others.
Rum was not generally used to disinfectant water on Royal Navy vessels. Typically the rum ration was only served with the midday meal. At other times the hands mostly drank plain water that had been stored in wooden barrels (and they complained about the taste).
And it wasn't always rum. If a vessel was on foreign service and rum was unavailable then the crew would be issued an equivalent amount of other booze.
The first comment is on point, pre-Prohibition the US was basically run on good old constitution juice. Turning excess grain into a storage-friendly form that also fetched a good price was a huge economic reality at all levels, from individual farmers to large land-owners. The side effect of that was that where people used to mostly drink cider and ale, applejack and the like, now it was cheaper and acceptable to just stay perpetually lit on whiskey.
While other comments have clearly shown that the alcohol in beer isn't strong enough to disinfect it, the way beer is made is that you first have to disinfect the water you're going to use (by boiling it) and then you store the beer in conditions that stop pathogens getting in. So for those reasons the beer would be safer than water, but you'd have just as much success just boiling some water and using it straight away. The other advantage of beer over water is that if it does get pathogens in it, then it is really obvious, and people know not to drink foul beer [citation needed].
I'm a certified Tech Diver if anyone has questions (TDI AN/DP & Heliox).
Fun fact is the narcotic effect is very sudden for most people at a certain depth (30m for me) and also clears just as quickly. It's more pronounced if you are tired and/or the water is cold.
Helium is very expensive like you say. Normal air fills are like $10 AUD, a tank of Trimix can be hundreds. https://www.scubadoctor.com.au/trimix-requested-mix.htm. Normally you would need 3 or more 12L tanks filled with 240L of gas in each, depending on the dive.
Most people who use it a lot do rebreather diving, where you can recycle a few liters over and over. The rebreather costs $10k AUD + training though and has many more parts that can fail. One is the oxygen sensor, that has limited lifespan and if it fails and you don't catch it quick enough can kill you (you switch over to bailout which is a backup gas supply).
>Except for helium, no other gas exists which does not have some form narcotic effect at higher pressures.
According to something mentioned in passing in a Scott Manley (amateur space youtuber) video about deep-sea diving: at high enough pressures you'll get similar effects from helium. It's thought that you can avoid this by subbing out the helium for hydrogen, but nobody so far has been insane enough to try.
I assume liquid breading is much easier at that point.
>The interesting thing about this research is that it sort of makes sense, and yet is very surprising. We’re basically continuously narked, we’re just so used to it we don’t even know.
I'd be interested in knowing how people are mentally when they're in spacewalk/Mir conditions. (1/3rd atmosphere, pure oxygen.)
Prior to that, in 1992, there was the French COMEX-sponsored HYDRA 10 experiment that saw Théo Mavrostomos dry-dive in a chamber to 701 meters (71.1 bars) - the world's absolute saturation dive depth record. Though that experiment used "only" 20% H2 (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618493-000-technolo...).
Reading that first article freaked the hell out of me, thanks.
Glad there's some people out there nuts enough to push the limits of this stuff. No idea why those people in new zealand don't use pressure suits to dive in that hole though.
I only have high school level chemistry, but if Helium is a noble gas it doesn't bond and so it can't have a narcotic effect, because it doesn't affect the chemistry of the brain
It's narcotic effect comes from lipid solubility (and because it basically crowds out other gases - likely oxygen - needed for chemical reactions). So basically, because it's an inert gas it prevents some reactions.
The narcotic effects of inhaled gasses don't seem to have anything to do with chemical bonds. There's something else going on. Even some noble gasses like argon are highly narcotic.
"We’re basically continuously narked, we’re just so used to it we don’t even know."
Just because one direction on the gradient means that we respond in a way that looks like a narcotic does not mean that the other direction will respond in the opposite manner.
I'm sure the nootropics folks would have discovered being super not high by now if it were as easy as breathing a mixture that doesn't have nitrogen in it.
You'd hope mind-hackers would've explored & confirmed/refuted/quantified the effect, but stuff like this often lies underexplored for decades, despite hints like this 1975 study – which actually shows the 'gradient' of clearer thinking continues in the other direction, no hand-wavy extrapolation required. It's what they found! In 1975!
How long did it take for society to fully recognize, & remediate, the effects of environmental lead? How many people & orgs remain oblivious to the cognitive deficits caused by high indoor CO2 levels?
I hope mind-hackers do some fresh research on this, with the advantage of 2023 levels of wealth/free-time/returns-to-improved-cognition/SCUBA-equipment. There could be some potential for positive surprise around what you're "sure" should've already been discovered.
Maybe it remains underexplored because if you find a significant effect and popularize it, then the substance gets banned. The people interested in using stuff like this have an incentive to avoid scientific research on the subject.
The delivery mechanisms for a nitrogen-free air – be they personal respiration devices or sealed environments – could be onerously regulated, or effectively banned for certain places/purposes.
Occasional helium shortages, and the characterization of terrestrial helium as a 'non-renewable' resource, has also made it the subject of industrial policy, with the federal government maintaining a reserve whose planned privatization is controversial.
Plus, there's often widespread resentment of performance-enhancers – hormones, stimulants, etc – when they are only accessible to a select few.
So I'd not be so sure that, if helium proved an essential part of some novel cognitive enhancement practices, its acquisition & use would remain legally-unencumbered.
Where are you coming up with that nonsense? You can get helium from any gas supplier, confine it indefinitely in tanks, and breathe it using any pressure regulator. No one cares.
A number of municipalities have already banned all helium balloons simply due to litter concerns. Major suppliers rationed helium sales as recently as 2022, after the Ukraine war limited supplies from Russia. Helium has often been the subject of proposed legislation for increased government management of prices or supplies, or special discounts for favored uses.
Now imagine a major new use – displacing nitrogen completely, for cognitive enhancement, for an entire work day – arrives. Some can tolerate traditional pressure regulators, but others dislike their bulk/discomfort – so novel delivery strategies, with more leak/loss (like full-room environments), proliferate.
Prices would be driven up for traditional (& government-favored) medical/industrial/research users. Helium leak detectors in industrial settings would face more false-alarms. Exhalation/outgassing would sometimes cause electronic malfunctions in neighboring offices/apartments. And even if almost everyone gets it right, someone somewhere will err in their processes, injuuring or even killing people.
New supply regulations against this novel, & politically disfavored use, would then be a risk – even if the net performance gains still significant.
As informative precedents, in the US, consumer access to pseudoephedrine, flavored cigarettes, & plastic straws has been noticeably restricted in the last decade, on flimsier rationales. It's become more difficult to acquire racetams & other nootropics in just the last few years. California is in the process of banning all gas appliances, despite a long tradition of cheap/easy access via household utility hookups.
So, while I'd hope you're right that no new restrictions on helium-purchasing would arrive, your certainty seems naive, in a childlike & history-oblivious way, to how reactionary supply-control regulations often develop.
They'll just make using it this way illegal and scrutinize purchases/suppliers as usual. NAC has been an over the counter supplement since the 70s and only an uproar from people a few years ago kept it unbanned by the FDA.
CO2 is a weird one. The science is pretty clear the trend exists and it’s even built into the building codes for HVAC. But some how that information never gets connected to the people that would actually be interested in maximizing cognitive ability.
> Just because one direction on the gradient means that we respond in a way that looks like a narcotic does not mean that the other direction will respond in the opposite manner.
that's literally what this study is about! this study is about how replacing nitrogen with helium decreased reaction time in human participants by over 9%.
as siblings commented, pure oxygen gets you high. a couple of breaths of pure oxygen will relieve pain and induce euphoria. I am not entirely clear on the definition of "narcotic" so i may be being redundant.
My issue, though, is i can't find a way to safely generate oxygen for a decent price. I know electrolysis works, but these atomic sieves look safer. They're also difficult to acquire without a prescription, at least from my searches in the US. And i know lithium can react to generate oxygen, but that's not what i consider "safe".
Someone else in this thread mentioned diving. When I was doing my advanced open water course, we did an exercise to demonstrate nitrogen narcosis. Super simple test: we had a card with the numbers 1-16 written on a 4x4 grid in random order. You have to tap the numbers in order and it’s a timed exercise. We did it on the surface in the boat and again at 30m depth; my performance was maybe 20% slower, my buddy was more like 40-50% slower.
Yeah, apologies, we did the first round about 6 feet below the surface. For me, at least, the resistance wouldn't have made a huge difference anyway; while some people suffer from nitrogen narcosis and don't realize it, I definitely felt mentally "slow" while doing the test at depth. It was frustrating knowing that, 15 minutes earlier, the task felt easy but at depth it felt really mentally challenging. While I was only about 20% slower, the qualitative mental effort was drastically higher.
> My issue, though, is i can't find a way to safely generate oxygen for a decent price.
Depends on the definition of generate and decent price, but you can buy stationary medical oxygen concentrator for $1000, portable for $3000. If you want something easier you can buy pre-filled bottles or refill existing bottles at industrial gas supply places. If you want more, you can get a concentrator setup which small private airports use to refill oxygen bottles for small private airplanes.
And lastly, if you need small amount quickly, you can buy Boost Oxygen Bottles from Amazon.
$1000-$3000 isn't decent for my use case; basically i want to use oxygen instead of ibuprofen for minor aches, coupled with heat or cooling. I find that pure oxygen does wonders for minor headaches and neck pain that i experience. $15-$25 a liter for oxygen is also not a decent price, relatively.
At one point i found some concentrators that were ~$500, sadly i did not order and the brand name was alphabet soup; good luck finding that again!
$1000 is for brand-name. Used/imported are cheaper.
Refills of LOX are cheap, but you need to pay for the cylinder, which is expensive. At the end of the day you can get welding oxygen, which is exactly the same as medical/aviator. (And also you need to handle the cylinder safely)
Anyway, just start with Boost and see if it helps. They run out quickly, but nothing beats the convenience.
New cylinders can get a little pricey but used bottles can be found dime-a-dozen on Craigslist/FB Marketplace/etc. Just need to know how to properly inspect a tank. Gas supply stores can get really particular about BYOBottle because of the safety/liability component, but they'll typically treat a no-fill tank as the deposit for a new tank in much the same way consumer propane tank exchange works.
Boost is likely the way to go for OP. I first saw them in Walmart in 2012 as a freshman at a military college. They made the surprise cadre workouts and X mile rucks suck so much less that I'd buy them all up when we were on liberty to sell out of my supply box. Really clever bit of kit, and the mint scent was a nice touch.
One of the easiest ways to separate oxygen from nitrogen is to cool it down. Oxygen will condense at around 90K, while nitrogen will stay gaseous until 77K. You need some fairly serious energy input to do this, but it'll be safer than doing electrolysis.
All you need is zeolite crystals and a compressor. Zeolite fixes nitrogen under pressure, so you can use it to separate nitrogen from oxygen. This is how those "oxygen concentrators" work. I'm sure you get can hold of a relatively-cheap chinese one, they don't have dangerous parts or controlled substances. But it wouldn't be that hard to build one from scratch either.
> Sorry, your search "oxygen concentrator" did not match any products. Please try again.
i thought it might be because of the /w/wholesale path, so i went to aliexpress (i have an account) and searched on the main page, and it gave the same result. Curiously, "oxygen concentrat" as the search term brings up alleged devices. This dovetails with my very short comment that such devices are hard to find without prescriptions, in the US.
Searching for similar things on amazon only brings up carrying cases and accessories for the "well known" brand(s) of oxygen concentrators. And for some reason both sites show results for these things that blow air in your face for whatever reason...
AliExpress search is kinda wonky, it sometimes just breaks for a bit on specific search terms, or maybe it'll work but only for certain sort orders.
The link is giving search results for me (although admittedly I'm not in the US, so if they're doing any country-specific filtering for US clients I wouldn't know about it).
Wow. Indeed my country was not set to USA. It seems that they do filter the results for USA customers, and researching further suggests that the FDA's position is that they not be used without a prescription. But is it illegal to sell one? Is it illegal to even make one? The situation seems murky. And silly.
> I'm sure the nootropics folks would have discovered being super not high by now if it were as easy as breathing a mixture that doesn't have nitrogen in it.
Maybe this is what Oxygen Bars are actually about but nobody knows it yet.
Also there are plenty of drugs that make you more focused, but they also make you _high_ at a certain dosage, _normal_ is just what's the default level.
While I am certified for Nitrox diving, I'm not sure I would actually use it very much. After over 100 open water dives and many dive classes (I was one class away from being a certified instructor back in the 1970s) I realized that I didn't want to do extreme diving. Night dives in the Caribbean are exciting enough. Wreck diving, ice diving, cave diving, commercial diving, hard hat diving all seem too dangerous. Diving in the warm, clear Caribbean was great, and 75% of that experience can be obtained with just a snorkel, mask and flippers.
One of my friends was a commercial diver working on Oil platforms in the North Sea. Out of the eight divers he worked with, he is the only one that lived through it without serious injury.
Nitrox is the single most issued specialisation. It’s most useful for repeat dives and on reasonably shallow dives. The most benefit you’ll get is in the 20-30m range.
As I mostly dive cold waters, I use a max PO2 of 1.4, instead of the 1.6 that some people use. This means that for deep dives (30-40m), I typically end up with EAN28 instead of the more common EAN32.
Nitrox is definitely not “extreme diving”, though. It’s just a way to increase your bottom time and reduce your surface interval. Just remember to keep an eye on your CNS%—there’s a limit to how much oxygen your body can safely handle.
I have experienced nitrogen narcosis before. It was like getting drunk very fast, including the room spinning. I hugged myself and ascended maybe 2-4m above the rest of the group and got back to normal pretty quickly after that and was able to continue to the dive.
There's no need to handle narcosis, just use more helium. Regardless of whether you subjectively feel it, the effect is always there and increases progressively with depth. Some divers claim that they can adapt to it and minimize the effects through repeated exposure but there's no reliable evidence that really works; I think they're just fooling themselves.
Note that some of the serious narcotic effects that divers feel are often due to CO2, which is even more narcotic than nitrogen. If you exert yourself and don't ventilate effectively then hypercapnia can hit you hard. Adding more helium to the mix also helps with this by reducing the gas density and making it easier to blow off the CO2.
It's due to the narcotic effects of nitrogen that GUE (Global Underwater Explorers, a diving association rooted in tech/cave diving) uses EAN32 (32% oxygen) as their standard breathing gas.
They're also more conservative in their recreational diving depths: 30m (100ft) is the recreational limit, beyond that technical certification and a helium-based breathing gas (e.g. Trimix) are required.
I think you misunderstood the GUE standards. Nitrox isn't significant less narcotic than air. They set a 100 ft equivalent narcotic depth maximum limit somewhat arbitrarily because empirically that seems to be pretty safe. Below that depth we add progressively more helium to the mix to limit narcosis as well as gas density (work of breathing).
Apparently, some divers will start feeling the narcotic effect between 20-30m. Beyond 30m, a significant amount of divers can feel the effects.
Beyond 40m is the realm of tech diving, with trimix (helium/nitrogen/oxygen) or even heliox (helium/oxygen). I know nothing about this, so I’ll let others comment.
The interesting thing about this research is that it sort of makes sense, and yet is very surprising. We’re basically continuously narked, we’re just so used to it we don’t even know.
Fun fact: the exact cause of nitrogen narcosis is not exactly understood. It is most likely the fact that at higher partial pressures nitrogen is able to enter the fatty tissues surrounding our nerves. Except for helium, no other gas exists which does not have some form narcotic effect at higher pressures.
Considering the prices of helium, this also explains why many deep divers are starting to consider rebreathers.