Each human breath acts as unique fingerprint for thinking

Breathing shapes thinking, attention, memory, perception, emotional regulation, and overall mental health by affecting activity in a variety of brain areas. One way breathing affects brain activity is through its relationship with rhythmic patterns of neural activity, or brain waves. Eena Kosik-Rose and Bradley Voytek, from the University of California, San Diego, led a study exploring this relationship by assessing how individual breaths at rest influence brain waves. This work is published in JNeurosci. 

Leveraging an epilepsy patient population with brain electrode implants for treatment purposes, the researchers compared the shapes of brain waves to the complex, variable shapes that individual human breaths create. The shape created by inhalation and exhalation corresponded to the shape of widespread neural activity in brain areas that support emotion, motivation, pleasure, thinking, attention, and memory.

Researchers have examined the relationship between these processes and breathing more simplistically-such as by looking at how breathing fast or slow influences brain activity and emotions or thought processes. But we found that this relationship is more nuanced than previously thought. Each breath you take has a fingerprint, so to speak, of impact on brain activity and mental state.” 

Eena Kosik-Rose, University of California, San Diego

According to the researchers, this work suggests that beyond brain mechanisms, brain–body interactions may be important to consider when assessing and treating neuropsychiatric patient populations. Speaking on future experimental plans, says Voytek, “Humans have an incredible degree of voluntary control over breathing, allowing the normally automatic breathing rhythm to be consciously modified for things like talking and singing. We plan to assess whether controlling the shape of our breathing influences cognition and mental health.”