Take a deep breath. In some forms of yoga and meditation, people are supposed to breathe in slowly through their nose. Now we may know why it鈥檚 helpful: nerves inside the nose start firing in a similar slow rhythm, prompting parts of the brain to do the same.
And in a test, people who did yoga with slow nasal breathing seemed to enter a deeper meditative state than when they did so breathing at the same rate through their mouths.
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Brainwaves are the result of large groups of nerve cells firing rhythmically. While their function is unclear, their frequency tends to reflect鈥�how awake and alert we feel. They are slowest during deep sleep, and fastest when we鈥檙e awake and concentrating.
Brainwaves also slow down when people are meditating, so Andrea Zaccaro of the University of Pisa, Italy, wondered if they could be affected by breathing.
Inside the nasal passages are nerve cells exposed to the air, which react to physical force. Zaccaro鈥檚 group has previously shown that when people have air puffed up their noses at a slow rhythm, . 鈥淵ou get the same frequency over a vast number of other cortical areas,鈥� says Zaccaro.
Altered consciousness
Now the team has found that slow natural breathing through the nose may have a similar effect. They asked 16 yoga practitioners to do yoga while taking 2.5 breaths a minute, either through their noses or their mouths for 15 minutes. Then the volunteers filled in two rating scales used to assess different aspects of consciousness.
While they didn鈥檛 measure brainwaves in this study, after nasal breathing, people were more likely to report altered consciousness, such as feeling more introspective and having altered bodily perceptions, Zaccaro reported at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies conference in Berlin last month.
This might have been a placebo effect, though, as the volunteers knew when they were breathing through their nose, and that this was the 鈥渞ight鈥� way to do yoga.
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