Dominic D'Agostino

technical diving where you have some off gassing.

That's part of it because the oxygen tanks are pretty small with a rebreather, but it's analogous to, we have a couple of ponds on our property.

And when I go in the pond and I see bubbles,

Coming across the pond, I know an alligator is coming towards me.

When your brother was there, we were looking at the alligators and just getting them to come to us by throwing pebbles in there when they hear something.

So if I go to the pond with a weed whacker, I see bubbles coming across.

So analogous situation would be a Navy seal coming across a body of water that still you can clearly see the bubble trail coming to you.

So with a closed circuit rebreather, that completely averts that, the bubble trail, and then there's also the noise that the bubbles make.

So you don't have that.

The problem is if you're wearing a closed circuit and you dive down to 100 feet of seawater because someone starts shooting at you or you have to go down deep to put a mine on the bottom of a bridge or something like that,

you're going to have a seizure within five minutes.

So oxygen is a stimulant.

It stimulates a massive amount of glutamate release that activates AMPA receptors, NMDA receptors.

It stimulates the neural network in ways.

It also sort of deactivates or inhibits an enzyme, glutamic acid,

acid decarboxylase, which converts more glutamate to GABA.

And there's a big burst in reactive oxygen species.

So you have a constellation of things going on in your brain.

So I study the negative effects of high oxygen, which kind of has some people who study hyperbaric oxygen a little bit standoffish towards me.

But in the context of lower oxygen, hyperbaric oxygen therapy can be very therapeutic.