Breathing Effects On Emotions and Judgement

We all know how oxygen is our basic breathing requirement to live, without which life on earth would not be possible. But, now there is more that researchers have discovered about breathing. As per their findings, the breathing pattern or rhythm is responsible fore creating electrical activity in the part of human brain that in turn helps in enhancement of memory recall and emotional judgments.

Further the neurologists also found that there was significant difference in brain activity in the hippocampus and amygdala area during inhalation rather than exhalation. While breathing in the neurons in the olfactory cortext, hippocamus, amygdala and across the limbic system are stimulated.
They apparently discovered the same when some of them were working on seven patients suffering from epilepsy. They were trying to find out the origin of seizures and installed electrodes in the brains of patients a week before surgery thus collecting the electro-physiological data directly from the brains. This is when they found out that while breathing the brain activity fluctuated. Brain activity occurs in areas memory, smells and emotions are processed.

Now, this led to another question on brain activity and it was where cognitive functions were typically associated and affected by breathing particularly memory and fear processing. As per findings the amygdala was linked fear related emotions of emotional processing strongly. To study the same 60 subjects were assigned the activity of making rapid decisions on emotional expressions while breathing in the laboratory itself. They were also shown different types of pictures with facial expressions of surprise or fear and the subjects had to recognize these expressions fast. The results varied in subjects when inhaling, exhaling and inhaling through mouth.

The results indicated that while inhaling the patients were able to recognize the expressions faster and better, of that of fear than exhaling. But, it did not hold true for surprise.

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