Researchers from Northwestern Medicine have uncovered how the rhythm of breathing improves emotional judgments and memory recall.

In the study, participants were able to identify a fearful face more quickly if they encountered it when breathing in than when they were breathing out. They were also more likely to remember an object if they encountered it on the inhaled breath than the exhaled one. This effect disappeared if breathing was through the mouth.

Their experiment involved individuals with epilepsy who were scheduled for brain surgery. One week prior their surgery, electrodes were implanted into the patients’ brains in order for the researchers to identify the origin of their seizures. This technique allowed the researchers to obtain electro-physiological data directly from the subjects’ brains. The electrical signals showed brain activity fluctuated with breathing, particularly in the areas where emotions, memory and smells are processed.

To test this, in another experiment, the researchers asked about 60 subjects to make rapid decisions on emotional expressions in the lab environment while recording their breathing. Presented with pictures of faces showing expressions of either fear or surprise, the subjects had to indicate, as quickly as they could, which emotion each face was expressing.

When they encounter faces during inhalation, the participants recognised them as fearful more quickly than when they encounter the same during exhalation.

When faces were encountered during inhalation, subjects recognized them as fearful more quickly than when faces were encountered during exhalation. This was not true for faces expressing surprise. These effects diminished when subjects performed the same task while breathing through their mouths. Thus the effect was specific to fearful stimuli during nasal breathing only.

These findings help provide a better understanding in the benefits of focused breathing, particularly in mental health. They also give another potential insight to the basic mechanisms of meditation.

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Source of this article:

Journal of Neuroscience

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