The way we breathe also affects our thinking and sensations - such a discovery was made by scientists from Northwestern University (USA), under the leadership of assistant professor Christina Zelano. An article about this, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, is retelling a university press release.
The starting point was the analysis of electroencephalograms of the brains of seven epileptics. Initially, the scientists implanted electrodes in them to find out the causes of the seizures, but the processing of the data obtained gave an unexpected result: it turned out that the electrical activity of the patients' brains varies greatly during inhalation and exhalation. Namely, on inhalation, neurons are excited. This applies to three areas of the brain: the olfactory cortex, the hippocampus (responsible for memory) and the amygdala (associated with processing emotions). All of these areas are part of the limbic system.
To better understand this mechanism, the scientists set up two series of experiments with 70 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 30 years.
In the first series of experiments, volunteers were shown the faces of people in a photo and asked to quickly decide whether they were scared or surprised. It turned out that on inhalation (that is, when the neurons of the amygdala were activated), the subjects recognized frightened faces a fraction of a second faster. Moreover, this only worked when the breath was taken through the nose. There was no significant difference in recognizing surprised faces.
In the second series of experiments, 42 volunteers were shown various objects on a computer screen, and after a while they were asked to remember them. This was already a test for hippocampal activity. It turned out that on inhalation the recognition of objects occurs better, and the effect is maximum, again when inhaling through the nose: then people correctly recalled, on average, 5% more objects.
The results obtained explain why, in critical situations, people begin to breathe more often, and usually not with their mouths, but just with their nose.
“If you are in a state of panic, your breathing accelerates. As a result, you spend proportionally more time breathing in than in a calm state,”explained Zelano.
However, the scientists in their article emphasized that the correlation they discovered between the rhythm of breathing, brain function and cognitive abilities does not mean an unambiguous and direct causal relationship. Further research is required to better understand this.
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