Challenges in education; The deep dive

Man's ever deeper descent into the sea has been halted at least with the knowledge and techniques now available. A scientist comments on his series of record breaking experiments. Yes I think we would definitely argue that we lose the type of the same pattern we use much beyond a thousand feet. None of the three of us who made these dives or code would have been functionally able to effect any serious work. And as you approach twelve hundred feet not only subjectively. But also objectively you know you are. You show such severe changes for instance my brain wave patterns and those of my colleagues started being deformed in such an alarming fashion that it's actually because of this that we stopped the experiment to avoid doing very serious damage. The speaker is Dr. Ralph Brower who dissented in a hyperbaric chamber in France to a record depth of eleven hundred ninety feet in a moment he speaks about the effects of the deep dive.

The. Challenges in education presented by Duke University here with today's feature is Charles Bronson. Testing the extreme depths to which man can go in the sea is no easy matter. Dr. Ralph Brower a physiologist and pharmacologist spent only four minutes at the record breaking depth with pressures 37 times greater than on the earth's surface. It took five and a half days decompressing in the chamber to return to surface pressure. What were his scientific accomplishments in the first place we demonstrated. I think for the first time a man that there is really a physiological barrier to penetration of man into the ocean. And in the second place in these three experiments that we do we managed I think to begin to pinpoint the nature of this barrier and to start formulating some of the questions that now I'm going to be back here and for a couple of months at least try to answer was much more critical animal experiments before we go back to man what

does man experience at these different pressures. Dr. Brower comments as you go down as you approach the steps of about a thousand feet in the dive where you go from the surface as we had to even if you go very slowly and we took three hours and a bit to go down are you start finding that your muscles and your limbs in general don't quite work the way they do it at the surface it begins shaking a little bit. You become aware of the fact that if you put your hand on your thigh these muscles are doing things without you having called upon them to leave. They feel this oh bunch of answerer crawling around. As you go on deeper this can become more serious and you can't. Dr. Beller being rather clueless flapping movements with a movement where you reach for a pan instead of being a nice smooth movement may become a movement that terminates in some violent shaking and then you can get your pan and pick it up. So this whole complexes. And then as you go a little deeper as you go say beyond 11 hundred feet

subjectively you start noticing that somehow everything becomes a little dim a little slow. That associations become though that somehow every day everything moves away the ability to initiate act comes. If you go a little bit deeper depending on the individual subject you find that at one point or another he'll begin to start getting mixed up about sleep and wakefulness you you could drop off for a moment and then you wake up and get dropped off and you wake up when you wake up you seem to be quite there but the business of slipping in and out between these two becomes very easy and certainly by the time you're on the bottom at the point where we finally aborted the experiment for other reasons are you. You somehow have a feeling that things are very very far from right and it's very difficult to put your finger on what goes on.

Males descent into the sea may be increased by experiments such as those conducted by Dr. Brower. This is Charles Russell with challenges in education from Duke University. This program was distributed by the national educational radio network.