The Rhythm of Your Breath Leaves a Fingerprint on Your Thoughts

Scholars and philosophers have linked the breath to thought for many thousands of years. Some of the early Upanishads, philosophical Sanskrit texts from Hinduism’s oldest scriptures, directly coupled stability of the mind to stability of the breath. And in the West, this connection was made explicit in Homeric epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, as Ancient Greeks thought the lungs were the seat of thought, emotion, and deliberation.

Modern cognitive scientists have identified still more explicit links, finding that the breath can have profound impacts on memory, attention to sensory signals, and sensitivity to emotions such as anxiety. But new research suggests the relationship between breath and thought may be even more intimate and subtle than scientists had thought. A team of scientists found that the electrical signaling deep in the limbic and cortical parts of the brain may track the specific shape of each breath on a millisecond basis, like a fingerprint.

They published their results in the Journal of Neuroscience. Read more: “Does Consciousness Require a Body?” The new work combines big questions from cognitive science, such as the nature of thought, with the methods of data science, says Bradley Voytek, coauthor of the study and chair of the University of California, San Diego, cognitive science department. Our brains exist in a body that evolved in this complicated world that obeys certain laws of physics, and that embodiment affects our cognition.” What data science brings to the work is the perspective that the world is rich with signals, and everything is data that can be measured, including temporal variations in the breath.

Eena Kosik-Rose, a UC San Diego PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science, led the study, together with Voytek, as well as scientists from Northwestern University, the George Washington University School of Medicine, the University of Iowa, and Children’s National Hospital. I spoke with Voytek about what features of the breath they measured, why they worked with epilepsy patients, and how much of our breathing is under our conscious control. There are so many ancient traditions that have treated breath and mind as one and the same.

The Greek word pneuma and the Latin spiritus both mean breath and also carried the sense of life-force or soul. Your findings seem to suggest the ancients were on to something. Breathing is linked even to the word inspiration.

When you say, “I got inspired,” you’re talking about the act of breath. We’re one of the few animals that can consciously control our breath, as far as we can tell, which is fascinating. Animals can sniff and things like that, but we can slow and control our breathing to a degree that other animals cannot, which some evolutionary psychologists believe is how language was able to evolve.