Every Breath You Take…is unique!
Breathing. That thing we do all day, every day, mostly without thinking about it. We may assume that it’s just taking place evenly and regularly in the background like clockwork, even when we’re not paying attention. Yet, how we breathe fluctuates from moment to moment, and that has a profound effect on our physiological state throughout the day. A new study from UC San Diego published in the Journal of Neuroscience reveals that natural human breathing is highly idiosyncratic. In other words, we each have our own rhythm and pattern of breathing, and each individual breath tends to be slightly different from moment to moment. The study found that the brain regions responsible for memory, emotion, and cognition closely mirror these subtle, individual variations in real-time.
Yogis and meditators and anyone who has tried breathwork know that you can influence your mood and energy, manage stress, and self-regulate by manipulating the breath in various ways. In this UC San Diego study, researchers tracked people’s airflow using chest belts or nasal devices and measured deep-brain neural signals using electrodes from epilepsy patients who already had intracranial implants. With this method, they were able to map neural activity to individual breaths, and the data lines mirrored each other with surprising precision. This new research provides a much tighter mind-body link than previously understood.
Imagine being able to use your breath to influence your thinking or how you remember information? What a powerful concept and tool. It’s early days and scientists are still learning about the link between breathing and the brain, but this “high-resolution mapping” could eventually help researchers understand mysterious, fatal events linked to irregular breathing—such as sudden death in epilepsy (SUDEP) and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)—potentially paving the way for early warning systems. It could allow us to control our nervous systems, emotions, and memories in novel ways. And it’s just more evidence of the inextricable link between our bodies and the breath that we all feel empirically in our practices.
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