Book: What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength by Scott Carney. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.

It was 3 stars most part of the book but I actually learned some stuff and added some pointers for further research, so it deserves a 4.

The good part of this book is to convince you, or at least inspire you to research a little bit on the topic, that we can be more than what we are now. The human body is capable of many extraordinary things but we usually don’t practice methods to improve ourselves. The technology around us made us lazy for many things and it may be a disadvantage for some situations or even for evolution purposes.

The bad part is the structure, the feeling was like:

  • 0-50% - Great, I’m skeptical but it makes sense, many pointers to further research
  • 50-80% - A lot of stories from people who tested the methods from Wim Hof, kinda boring
  • 80-95% - Memoir of his adventure after training
  • 95-100% - Some good data on the results of the whole training comparing to the initial tests

Here are some of my notes, most of them are pointers for further research:

  • Froid: the pleasure principle
  • Super tasters are people who have a very sensitive taste (PTC sensitivity)
  • Tetrachromacers are people who see 100M colors instead of 2.4M
  • Absolute pitch. Define a note of the piano without any reference
  • Synesthesia, people who see colors and feel the smell or taste
  • Absolute pitch is a biological condition and must be trained to become perfect pitch. If not trained it may be disabled by disuse
  • Considering the evolution theory, may be a relation of the loss of body hair with the ability to make fire
  • When holding breath, it’s not the need of new oxygen that makes the urge to breathe, but the amount of CO² to be expelled. If you let it go out a little bit the body alarms will stop for a while.
  • Meditation helps to lower the brain activity and consume less energy
  • Laird Hamilton (giant waves)
  • Wim Hof (iceman)

Summary: It’s worth reading. :)