Freediving Neurophenomenology and Skilled Action, Brain, Body, and Behavior Through Breath
Authors: Suraiya Luecke
DOI / Source: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09808-8
Date: 11 February 2022
Reading level: Advanced
Why This Matters for Freedivers
This paper puts words (and a framework) to something many divers feel but struggle to explain: that “in the zone” freediving state where the world gets quiet, perception sharpens, and you act without overthinking. Understanding these patterns can help you train the right mental skills (relaxation, attention, body-sensing) and also spot the risk side—how the same “quiet mind” that improves performance can become dangerous if it makes you ignore warning signals.
Synopsis
This paper isn’t a physiology study in the usual “numbers and tables” sense. It’s more like a guided tour of what freediving feels like from the inside—and what might be happening in the brain and body at the same time.
The author combines two kinds of evidence: (1) scientific data about breathing, breath-holding, and the body’s dive response, and (2) interviews with freedivers describing their real experiences underwater. When those two views are put together, the claim is that freediving can create a distinctive “state” with recognizable mental features:
- A stronger sense of presence. Divers describe being intensely in the moment, with time feeling slowed or irrelevant.
- Sharper perception—inside and out. Many report heightened body awareness (tiny shifts in tension, contractions, pressure, equalisation cues) and heightened awareness of the environment.
- Less self-talk and less reflective thinking. Instead of narrating the dive in their head, divers describe a quieter mind—more doing, less analyzing.
- Decision-making that’s fast and embodied. Choices often feel like they happen through the body (“I just go”) rather than a step-by-step internal debate.
- A narrower emotional range. Calm and focus dominate, because strong emotion costs energy and can disrupt the dive.
A big theme is the role of breath as more than just oxygen and CO₂. The author argues that breathing patterns (especially the slow, relaxing breathe-up) may help shape attention, calmness, and how the brain coordinates action. The paper then connects all of this to a theory of skilled performance (“Skilled Intentionality Framework”), basically asking: how do experts do the right thing at the right time in complex, changing conditions—without constantly thinking about it?
If you’re a freediver reading this, the practical takeaway is not “use this trick to dive deeper,” but: your best dives often come from a specific state—calm body, quiet mind, sharp perception, and actions that are tuned to the moment. And training is largely about learning how to reliably access that state while still respecting safety limits.
Abstract
In this paper I investigate the neurophenomenology of freediving (NoF) and the Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF), using these two components to mutually inform each other in order to better understand cognition in skilled action. First, this paper provides a novel neurophenomenological exposition of the practice of freediving. It combines quantitative neurophysiological data with qualitative phenomenological reports in order to understand the neural and bodily mechanisms that correlate with the phenomenology of freediving. The NoF data suggests that freediving induces a unique neurophysiological state. This unique neurophysiological state forms the basis for a peculiar and exceptional experiential state, which is phenomenologically characterized by a heightened sense of presence, heightened perception, lack of reflective awareness, lack of anticipation in decision-making, and restricted emotional range. Second, this paper synthesizes the NoF data and the SIF conceptual framework of cognition in skilled action in order to investigate how the two can mutually inform one another. This synthesis provides 1) a unified and cohesive understanding of the NoF data; 2) elucidation and clarification of three key features generalizable to SIF’s metastable zones; 3) refinement of the role of anticipation in SIF, with the focus shifting instead towards task-specific constraint of action-readiness; and 4) an investigation of the breath, an understudied dynamical oscillator of brain, body, and behavior, which provides an empirical mechanism to support SIF’s theoretical assumption of the dynamical self-organization required in skilled action. Looking more broadly, this neurophenomenological investigation of freediving elucidates a novel case study which can provide rich perspectives and fertile material for further scientific, phenomenological, theoretical, and philosophical investigations in ecological psychology, expertise, reflection, enactivism, and cognition more generally.