Humming, and the Gas in the Sinuses

Svātmārāma's (स्वात्माराम) whole instruction for bhrāmarī (भ्रामरी) is one verse, and most of it is sound.

वेगाद्घोषं पूरकं भृङ्ग-नादं भृङ्गी-नादं रेचकं मन्द-मन्दम् । योगीन्द्राणामेवमभ्यासयोगाच्चित्ते जाता काचिदानन्दलीला ॥

vegād ghoṣaṃ pūrakaṃ bhṛṅga-nādaṃ bhṛṅgī-nādaṃ recakaṃ manda-mandam | yogīndrāṇām evam abhyāsa-yogāc citte jātā kācid ānanda-līlā ||

Inhale quickly, with sound — the note of the male bee. Exhale slowly, slowly — the note of the female bee. Do this and in the heart of the great yogins there arises a certain play of bliss.

Notice what is not in it. The ears. Plugging them with the fingers is taught almost everywhere bhrāmarī is taught, and it is not in this verse. The Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā does teach it — at 4.82, closing the ears with the hands to hear the inner sound — but that is nāda (नाद) practice, two chapters later, and it is not called bhrāmarī. Attaching the ears to the name comes from the Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā, where bhrāmarī is a different practice altogether: after midnight, in silence, ears shut with the hands, listening for a sound in the right ear that goes cricket, flute, thundercloud, bell, kettledrum. Two techniques, one name. Keep them apart.

Now the gas.

Nitric oxide is made in the paranasal sinuses, the air pockets in the bone around the nose, and it is made continuously and in quantity. That got established in two steps, both the hard way. First, people whose cilia do not work: in Kartagener's syndrome the nasal nitric oxide is about ninety-eight per cent gone, which put the source in the nose. Then, a year later, sampling straight out of the sinuses put it in the sinuses.

It matters downstream. It opens the small vessels of the lung and improves the match between air and blood, and it is antimicrobial in the sinus itself. Breathe through the nose and you carry a dose of it down with every inhale. Breathe through the mouth and you carry almost none.

In 2002 two researchers in Stockholm asked what would happen if the air in the sinuses got shaken. The sinuses open into the nose through a narrow gap, and gas exchange across it is slow. Oscillating airflow, they thought, should speed it up.

Ten subjects. Nitric oxide measured during quiet exhalation and during humming, at a fixed flow rate.

Fifteen-fold.

The follow-up is the one that should be quoted alongside it, because it changes what you would actually do.

The peak falls off with repetition, and how fast depends on the gap. Hum, and you get a big spike. Hum again five seconds later and you get less; by the fourth breath you are on a low plateau, about a quarter of where you started. Leave a minute between and it is erratic. Leave three minutes and it comes all the way back. And measured right after repeated humming, the silent nasal nitric oxide sits 5 to 50% below where it started.

The verse, read against that, is oddly well built. A quick inhale with sound, then a long slow hum going out, done as a set — and the hum is on the exhale, which is where the gas gets moved. Whether Svātmārāma knew anything about sinus openings is not a question worth asking. He knew what it did to the person doing it.

There is one more measurable thing about a sustained hum, which is what it does upstairs.

Twelve volunteers chanted om out loud inside a 3-tesla magnet, in blocks, against a control of saying "ssss" — same effort, same airflow, no vibration. During om there was significant deactivation in the right amygdala, and on both sides in the anterior cingulate, hippocampus, insula, orbitofrontal cortex, parahippocampal gyrus and thalamus. The "ssss" did nothing in those regions either way.

Two details get inflated in the retelling. The amygdala deactivation was right-side only. And a deactivation on a scan is a drop in blood oxygenation in a voxel. It is not a measurement of calm.

So: ten people, once. Twelve people, once. That is a thin evidentiary base for a practice that has been taught for six centuries, and it would be dishonest to dress it up. What is not thin is the direction. Every one of these points the same way the verse does — that the sound is not incidental, and that the exhale is where the work is.

Inhale quick. Hum the exhale long. Then be quiet for three minutes.