Funny You Should Ask
The QI elves are a team of writers and comedians who find the answers to impossible questions, doing the research for the long-running QI TV series, podcasts and the spin-off books. For the next little while, we’ll be running some of their finest findings: the weird, wonderful, witty and wise, from their latest book, 222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions.
How many breaths do we take a day?
On average, we breathe just over 20,000 times a day – about 15 times a minute. Your lungs fill with air without you having to think about it, which is handy because you wouldn’t have time for much else if you had to remember to take 670 million breaths in a lifetime.
Most of us are overbreathing. This is partly because we sit for long periods, often hunched at desks, so don’t use our diaphragms as effectively as our ancestors, who typically made 10 breaths a minute. Ironically, we’re still underoxygenated, because despite taking more breaths, they’re shallower. So, our oxygen intake is 30% lower than it should be, which puts strain on our heart and releases a hormone called cortisol, which makes us even more stressed. Another reason we don’t use our diaphragm fully is that we don’t like the way we look when we stick our bellies out.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the British Museum was empty for weeks at a time, and curators discovered that some delicate artefacts were suffering from a lack of human breath. Usually, 17,000 visitors would be exhaling over the exhibits every day, and without them, the air was less humid. Some pieces had to be moved to climate-controlled rooms that did the work of thousands of pairs of lungs.
A LOAD OF HOT AIR
Hibernating painted turtles breathe through their bottoms. Under medieval Welsh law, a woman could divorce her husband if he had terrible breath.