Breathwork and Flow: How Breathing Prepares the Brain and Body for Peak Performance

Welcome to Flo Radio. I am Dr. Michael Menino. I am the Chief Science officer here at FLO Research Collective. Today I'm joined by my co host, Flow Research Collective Executive Director and bestselling author, the one and only Steven Cutler. We're honored to have a special guest, Dr. Jack Feldman, with us today, a distinguished researcher and neuroscientist renowned for his groundbreaking work in the neural control of breathing. Dr. Feldman's illustrious career spans several decades during which he has made significant contributions to our understanding of how the brain regulates one of the most fundamental processes of life, breathing. His research not only advanced the field of neuroscience, but also has opened up new avenues for understanding respiratory disorders and potential therapeutic inventions and so on. Dr. Feldman is a professor of neurobiology at UCLA and has been at the forefront of numerous pivotal studies that have deepened our comprehension of the neural circuits involved in breathing. His work is characterized by a very meticulous empirical approach and unwavering dedication to uncovering the intricate mechanisms that sustain human life. He's a world leader in understanding the neural control of breathing. Perhaps one of Dr. Feldman's most significant contributions include the discovery and naming of the Pre Botzner complex, which we may get into today. Today, that's a key area in the brain stem responsible for the controlling for controlling breathing rhythms. So in this episode we will explore Dr. Feldman, Dr. Feldman's journey in neuroscience, discuss some key discoveries from his research, previous and current research, and gain insights into the future directions of the field. So whether you're interested in flow, flow state, mind, body connection, the neuroscience of breath work, this conversation promises to be both enlightening and inspiring. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Jack Feldman to the podcast. It's an honor to have you with us today and I'm going to let Stephen start us off with a question.

Before you start, let me just say it's a privilege to be here. I appreciate your kind introduction. In fact, maybe I'll transcribe it and put it on a T shirt. And I really enjoy the opportunity or appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and talk to the people who listen to your podcast, because I think understanding about breathing, which as you remarked, is one of the most fundamental processes, I think is a benefit to all. And so I'm here to just try and spread the word. So thanks.

I got to start off with a quick question. So you recorded a podcast with Andrew Uberman in your living room, and I have to ask you, over your shoulder on the mantle of the fireplace, were those opium Pipes or matcha cups? I couldn't decide. I'm looking up through the whole podcast, and I was like, are those opium pipes behind him?

We didn't indulge in anything using those artifacts, but given Andrew's Argentinian heritage, I'm almost certain it's macha and all right. Yeah. So I think, well, that's a discussion perhaps, for another podcast.

Let me kick us off with, actually, a science question. It's.

Sa.

There's a famous evolutionary biologist, Doshansky, who said, you can't understand anything of biology without understanding the context of evolution. If I wanted to make something to go from point A to point B, right now, the majority of things that were built have wheels. Well, but wheels are not both easy to implement in terms of biological systems, but also in terms of evolution. That's not how it happened. It happened that we came out of the water, we developed these limbs, and that's how we did things. And every subsequent evolutionary mutation that had an advantage had to be built on what was there previously. And sometimes we forget that our brains were not generated de novo. And we have lots of limitations. Our brains evolve to help us survive in the real world. And most of us don't understand that the way we see the world is not necessarily how the world actually is, but it's our evolutionary solution to optimize as best we can our ability to survive, the procreate and so on and so forth. And that puts a lot of very interesting perspectives on the way you think the brain works. You know, no matter how long, many times you look at those two lines that, you know are parallel and they don't look parallel, it's because the brain evolved in ways where that optical illusion, when implemented in the real world, actually has benefit. And so we do things and we behave in ways that may not seem that an engineer starting DENOVA would do. But it's the way we got here and the way we are, and we have to consider that. I've commented about breathing. I don't mean to jump ahead about the relationship of inspiratory breathing versus expiratory breathing. We, as mammals are inspiratory breathers. And I can go into what the advantages of that are. But prior to the appearance of mammals, amphibians and reptiles are primarily expiratory breathers. And that has to do all sorts of things with respect to the physiology and anatomy of their lungs, the mechanics of the respiratory muscles. And over time, that changed. In part, it had the advantage that the changes in the lung allowed us to Continuously take in more oxygen, allowed us to develop big brains that were active continuously. But to do that, we also had to have some other parallel changes, one of which is the development of the diaphragm. So all these things only make sense in a, in a evolutionary context.

And Jeff, let me, let me just clarify for a second what you're.

What, what you actually just said.

So reptiles. Oh, they're. They relax during inhalation. That happens sort of automatically. And there they use energy on their exhalation. And humans are the inverse, Right? That's.

I, I Correct, correct, correct. So in other words, they constrict their rib cage. They have no diaphragm. They constrict their rib cage and then relax. We expand our rib cage and pull down on a diaphragm and inhale and then relax. So it's basically the total opposite. And that has consequences.

And mammals are the only. That's unique to mammals.

I'm correct.

You know, I'm not a comparative biologist, but I would go so far as to say that that's correct.

Jack. This is related. This is related to actually something that I did say in the introduction. You're an expert in the neural control of breathing and respiration. Not, and I said this on purpose, the neural control of breath work. So I wanted to ask you about that and sort of couch the rest of the conversation, if we can, describing the science, but also prescribing the practical application, more maybe, of an applied neuroscience approach, something that we can take away. Strategies, techniques, tactics to improve our well being, improve our performance, and maybe even better facilitate flow. So this is related to this, this idea of conscious versus non conscious, or let's just say unconscious breathing. And this is Stephen, related to your question about evolution.

Right.

For some reason, we have this volitional control, this ability to control consciously our breath work, and that has different outcomes. And so I was wondering if you could start us off with maybe speaking to that distinction a little bit. This, this idea of the neural control of breathing, which your research is on, versus, maybe not versus, and the neural control of breath work, that is doing something consciously to change our states, our cognitive or emotional states.

Okay, I'll try to keep my response to less than an hour.

Okay, thank you. It's a big question.

Hey, everybody, what's going on?

This is Steven Kotler, executive director of the Flow Research Collective and one of your hosts here on Flow Radio. I just want to start out by asking you a question. What do you think the cost of not performing at your absolute best Actually is what's the cost to your life? What's the cost to your dreams? Maybe your unfulfilled dreams. These are the cost to your family of not showing up in the world, that your best is what's the cost to your organization, the company you run or that you work for? What's the cost to your friends? I ask you all this as a way of introducing Zero to Dangerous flagship training program at the Flow Research Collective. This is the same training we used with every from companies like Meta, Accenture, Audi, Bain Capital, all the way to the U.S. air Force and the San Francisco Police Department. Navy SEALs have taken this course, NBA coaches have taken this course, and everybody in between. Literally everybody. We train people in 130 countries, we train people in over 28 industries. Our training is award winning and it is definitely successful. On the back end of Zero Dangerous, our customers see a marked increase in the amount of flow in their lives. Flow, that's the optimal state of peak performance. It's the reason you're tuned into Flow Radio. Our customers see a 70, 80% boost in the amount of flow in their lives. Peak performance moves from something reserved for very special occasions to a regular part of their day to day experience. And as flow increases, people see focus, motivation, productivity, creative problem solving, they all start to soar simultaneously. Our customers see a mark decrease in anxiety, stress and burnout. So if you're interested in harnessing flow to amplify focus, motivation, productivity, to fire up the fire in your belly, to get you really chasing your dreams, offer the best you have to the world, you should check out Zero Dangerous might be the right program for you. Just might be time to take everything to the next level. Check out the link below.

Well, you know, clearly the primary role of breathing is to get oxygen into the body and get the metabolic byproduct of aerobic metabolism out, which is carbon dioxide. And that's the primary role. But it's not the only role. And there are numerous other things where we have to remove air, which requires basically the same muscles for other behaviors. We have reflexes like coughing, sneezing, yawning, all involve the movement of air, which requires the orchestration of these muscles in different ways. So already you can because see that the control of these muscles is not just a simple pendulum rocking back and forth. It has to be much more involved in that to be able to go to all these various different modes. Now one of the most important alternative basic forms of breathing are size. So as mammals, we sigh about every five minutes, humans sigh about every Five minutes. Now, speaking to my colleagues outside my silo, most of them are off by a factor of 10 or more about how often we sigh. And they think we only sigh when we have some emotional valence to it. You know, we're anxious or whatnot. But it turns out that sighing goes way back in an evolutionary sense and probably is something we see in all mammals, because the one distinguishing feature about mammalian lungs is that the gas exchanging surface of the lung is an enormous surface in a relatively small volume. So you have this volume of maybe 5 meters at maximum inhale, and yet you pack in 70 square meters of surface area for gas exchange. Now, how do you do that? Well, nature figured out how to do that, is that you start out with this one, two, the trachea, and it branches and branches and branches, and the branches may be 20 or more times and each. So that's, you know, two to the 20 something branches. And at the end of each branch is a tiny little sphere that, where gas can be exchanged, that is where blood from the heart is going into the lung, goes right next to these little spheres which are called alveoli. And then there CO2 leaves the blood and oxygen comes in. We have these 70 square meters, 400 to 500 million alveoli. They're all tiny. They're a fraction of an inch, hundredth of an inch. And they have the property that because they're so small, they have a random probability of collapsing. And when they collapse, the sides tend to stick to each other because they're lined by a fluid called surfactant. And surfactant is necessary for the proper mechanical properties of the lung. But as the alveoli collapses, the wet sides stick to each other. It's sort of like having a balloon where you put water in it, get all the water out, but the insides are wet. You stick the balloon together, you try and blow it up. An ordinary breath is not going to do it. You're going to have to go, and then the balloon will pop open. Well, your alveoli collapsing all the time at a very low rate. But remember, you have 4,500 million of them. So the reasonable number of collapsing all the time, if you take a ordinary breath, it doesn't pop them open. If you take a sigh, it will pop open if you do it often enough. And so we are programmed to sigh about every five minutes. And what I tell my pals is, if you don't believe me, and I accept the fact that they don't have to believe me, is to lie down in A quiet place, and pay attention to your just normal breathing. And you'll see every five minutes or so, you take a deep breath, you're not doing it on purpose. It's not conscious. And so that's what is referred to as a physiological sigh. Now, we also know we sigh for when we're emotionally charged. So when we're sad, when we're happy, we'll sigh. And this is the question is, why are we doing that? I and others have several ideas why we're doing that. One is that as a form of communication, primates, particularly humans, we communicate a lot by facial expression tells. When you play poker, you can read people's expression. A salesman is able to fake it. Great actors are able to fake it. If I asked you with a smile, you'll say cheese. And I could realize it's not a smile because you're happy, it's because you're moving your muscles to emulate a joyful smile. But when you're joyful, I can read it. Our brain is able to figure that out. So we have all these emotions that we can communicate, and a sigh is one of them. So if I'm talking to someone, I see them sigh. It's communicating something to me that I have to figure out. Why this sigh. Hopefully it means that they're engaged in the conversation, they are comfortable, and so on and so forth. Now, it turns out that a single deep breath is calming. That's just a fact. Now, where did that come from? And hearing, going back in evolution, if a single breath is calming, if you're a prey and a predator is after chasing you, so you're a small mammal and some bigger mammal is chasing you, and you find some place where you can hide. You don't want to move. You want to be as relaxed and as calm as possible. Now, if it turns out that you sigh, you're going to be calmer, that could give you some selective advantage. And so that will tend to stay in the gene pool. Now remember, this is a just so story. This is, I have no data on this. This is a late night, having a couple of drinks kind of idea. But the notion is that taking these sighs are calming and that could stay in to your help. Your ancestors starts to make a connection between breathing movements and emotional control. And over time, this can be further taken advantage of. Because breathing, breathing itself, baseline breathing, is an oscillation. When we look at brain function, one characteristic of brain function across all mammals is that there are a variety of oscillations that are brainwide. They can propagate across different parts of the brain, but they vary in frequency from maybe 100 times per second to a few per second. And what neuroscientists think is happening here is basically two things. One, it is allowing processes to synchronize. That is, if a region of the brain has this oscillation, and at the peak of the oscillations, all the neurons are a little bit more excitable. And then it goes to the trough of the oscillation, There'll be a variation in excitability in that particular region of the brain that will tune it at those times. And where that has benefit in what's called binding. Binding is the fact that you have all these different things going on all over your brain, and yet for most things, we perceive them as a whole. So you're hearing my voice and you're seeing my face on the video, but you don't see two separate spaces. You see hopefully something that's one coherent piece that is me talking. Now, the thing is, the sound is coming in your ear, my video is coming in your eyes. How does your brain put that together? Well, the brain puts that together by the signals of ultimately converging. But how do I know that they're coming from the same thing? I think we've all had the experience of watching a video where the sound is a little bit shifted because there's something wrong. And our brains, we have a lot of difficulty with that. And so what the brain wants to do is it's saying if these signals are closely tied to each other, they may be related. So the signal coming in your ear, the signal coming in your eye, if they arrive at a particular time and it's close together, then they could say, okay, that's jack. If it was somehow desynchronized, you'd have a hard time doing that.

Now, these are for half a second, gamma binding rights. The gamma wave. Are you saying breath rides the same wave and is responsible for binding together the now?

Okay, okay, so you're jumping ahead. But the thing is, up until about 10, 15 years ago, no one paid any attention to breathing rhythms in the brain. And then about 10, 15 years ago is the realization that many parts of the brain have very strong breathing related oscillations. And the neuroscientists have learned from past mistakes that signals that come into the brain are not just thrown away, that the brain has some way of using these signals. And it appears that the breathing signal is another one of these oscillations. Gammas are much faster Breathing is a lot slower, but to the degree that there could be binding is demonstrated by blocking at least some aspects of those rhythms to getting into the brain in rodents and seeing that there's a change in their behavior. And so the one thing that breathing does that's different than gamma or delta or many of these other ways is that we have easy volitional control. We can go From a normal 10 to 18 breaths per minute to literally no breaths per minute, or three to six breaths per minute during certain aspects of breath work or high frequency. So we can change that over a rather broad range. Now, to the degree that parts of the brain are using those signals for its local signal processing now, you disrupt it, changes are going to occur. One analogy I'd like to use, and I use this during the Hugman podcast, is let's think of depression. We could think of depression as activity going in a circle of neurons in a particular part of the brain, where our sense of it is what we call depression. Now, what happens in the nervous system when activity is constantly repeating, there's a tendency for the connections to get stronger, and if it continues to repeat, they get stronger still. Individuals who go through this process and are depressed to the degree that the circuit has been there a while, it's very tightly bound and it's very hard to break. We see this in individuals who have serious clinical depression. It's hard to break. How can we break it? Non formless, non pharmacological. Well, one of the more powerful ways of doing it for depression that is refractory to drugs is electroconvulsive therapy. You put electrodes on the sides of the head, you put a big electric shock in. And what that does is it disrupts activity throughout large parts of the brain. And what happens is in these individuals, they get transient relief from their depression. And what I think is happening is you're this. It's not just me. I mean, what appears to be happening is you're disrupting the circuits that underlie this depression. And it takes a while for them to sort of get back to where they were before. But if you do it over time, what happens is when you disrupt the circuits, the synapses or the connections between neurons have an opportunity to get weaker. And if you keep repeating it, they get weaker to the point you get longer lasting relief from depression.

Now, elections also, Harris says that it's good that with psychedelics, it's good to shake the snow globe every now and again. Right? It's a huge, big pattern interrupt to the electoral circuits. Etc.

Yeah. Okay. So undoubtedly there's a component of psychedelics where the interruption of the circuit could have the same effect. But if we're talking about things that related to brain oscillations directly, electroconvulsive therapy is pretty heroic. Now it can be done with deep brain stimulation, where a neurosurgeon will put a small electrode in a particular part of the brain, inject a very small current that will disrupt the circuit. And so in. Ultimately you get the same thing. Now, clearly that's also pretty heroic. It works. It can be done routinely. But what can we do for every man? Well, suppose these circuits involve breathing and then their normal activity. You now disrupt it. So we know we're disrupting it because a single breath makes you calmer. Before you go give a talk to a big audience, before you proposed to your significant other, before you pee off on the first hole of a golf course. And we watched the Olympics before a race competition, a deep breath, or a few deep breath is calming. So we know that somehow the breath is tied into those circuits. So now if you disrupt them for 30 minutes at a time, five minutes at a time, over a period of time, you can get with the red hemisphere, then the circuits begin to weaken. And that weakening can now become a more permanent diminution of the power of the circuit or a more complete disruption. And it's a gradual effect. It's like sort of walking in a loop on a. On the ground. You eventually, you know, get in a trough that's so deep you can't sort of jump out of it. But if you gradually sprinkle in dirt and it gets higher and higher and higher, you may be able to get out of it. So breath work is sort of like sprinkling in this dirt. It's not going to necessarily take you out permanently, but it will give you a base work to do this.

So are you saying that volitional control, conscious control of breathing, various breath work practices, can that, does that affect synaptic plasticity, neuroplasticity over time, such that you can get better at that breathing technique. And that has then affects, you know, neural. Neural.

Yeah.

So, Michael, I want to ask a related question. Jack, what. What I'm hearing you say is exactly what Michael said, that you're getting syntactic plasticity and opening up a synaptic plasticity. Why are you. Or maybe you are, and I'm just too dumb to get it. Why are you not also replace.

What.

Why are you not just replacing with a new skill that Is breathing slowly, volitionally. Why is it shaking up synaptic plasticity? Why are you just not coding for the breathing skill?

Wait, wait, wait, Jack, before you answer that question. So there was, I think there was some research by Hasenkamp in like 2019, there is some data showing that back to synchronization, that like 10, 10 seconds of a full breath cycle inhalation and exhalation had increased. Well, a couple of things. It had increased alpha synchronization across various areas of the brain. And it lowered default mode network activity, which by the way, is related to psychedelics in some way shape. They lower. And that might. That might facilitate flow, by the way, but it was not three seconds. It was not four seconds. It was not 12 seconds or 16 seconds. It was like 10 seconds. So I'm wondering if you do that more often and you make that a practice, does that affect synaptic plasticity over time?

Okay. I'm very ecumenical about the particulars of given breathwork practices in terms of having an effect. Part of, you know, part of what I find in speaking to people, it ranges from individuals who are very sophisticated about breath work to people who know nothing about it. And so I, it. It sometimes a concern to me that they sort of want to jump into some more intensive practice. And what I tell them is to approach it like a couch potato with exercise. That is, do something simple like box breathing or 4, 7, 8, see if that has an effect. And sort of like a couch potato walking around the block. Just walk around the block. Don't get breathless. You feel comfortable. Do a little bit more than do a little bit more. And then when you feel comfortable, maybe you start jogging. And then you might get to the point where you say, okay, I want to optimize strength, power, endurance. And each one of those things could be optimized by a different training program. And I think it's probably the same thing with breath work. Most people that I interact with are not familiar with it, and they're a little bit skeptical. And I try and slow ramp them into this because I'm not an expert. But I drank the Kool Aid because I found that for me, it was very effective. And so the notion, whether it's 10 seconds or 8 seconds or 12 seconds, I can't really comment on. I think that there are many different breathwork practices, and unfortunately, the data is very scattered. Many of the experiments are underpowered and not well controlled. And I'm not disparaging anyone. One study, but it's apparent now in most biomedical research that this is a endemic problem, that you get a one off study that has interesting results and then it can't be repeated or there's problems because the proper control wasn't done. And so I can refer you to a beautiful review written by Tanya Bentley and her colleagues at the Health and Human Performance Foundation. What they did is they looked at a couple of thousand papers related to breathwork and they had a bar about reproducibility, controls, measurements and so on and so forth. And I think they wound up with relatively few papers that met the bar. I think it was maybe 50 out of a few thousand. I could be off by a factor of 10 here, but that's not the point. A lot of the papers, they didn't say they were wrong. They said that I'm not going to bet my life on this one. And what they found was that across the papers that met these rather stringent criteria, five minutes a day of breath work, 30 days produce reproducible, long lasting effects on emotion and physiological variables. And that's.

Can I ask you a related emotion question, especially to your, to your. As we're going in here. So this is one of the things I found. I. So let me just. We'll put it in the show notes. But for anybody listening, your, your recent, your really excellent recent paper on breathing, emotion, depression and opioids was, was phenomenal. I was so shocked to see the endorphins involved in. Like it made sense when I saw. But I was like, wait a minute, what are endorphins doing in the breath work process? Is it always there? So can.

You sa.

Okay, so, you know, take three minutes to answer my questions, if you will.

Well, the challenge that we have is that to answer the questions that you're raising, synaptic plasticity, opioids, it cannot be studied at the level necessary to answer the question in humans. And so the question is, how do you study it? And the limiting factor is we don't have or we did not have a good model to study this under conditions where we could really get at these issues of synaptic plasticity and the role of opioids and dynamics. I mean, we got into the opioid studies of breathing from the completely opposite end because of the tragic nature of opiate overdose and the principal cause of death is asphyxiation. People stop breathing. For certain situations, certain very serious illnesses. It's basically the only way to get relief from pain. So the question is. So we're in the process of trying to do that. We have a Paper which we just resubmitted, where we may have found a protocol that can increase the sensitivity to opioids in terms of producing respiratory depression. And the idea being that this might be able to reduce the likelihood that someone succumbs from an opioid overdose. On the other side, the release of endorphins, the good feelings you get, and so on and so forth. We have not done anything, and it's a little hard to quantify. Now, saying that about five years ago, no more than that, I took a course in learning how to meditate in mindfulness. Because for me to get motivated to spend the effort to do the basic research, I have to have a sense that the effect is real and that it's something that is ultimately important. So I took a course in learning how to meditate. And it was a course. UCLA had a mindfulness institute. I took that mindfulness course, and I had two questions, which is a joke I've told a hundred times. Well, not a joke. It's the truth, but it's meant to be amusing and not taken seriously. That I had two goals. One is to see whether the breathing aspect of the meditation was critical or just a distraction. You know, you could wiggle your fingers and focus on that, and that may serve the same purpose. And the other, being a kid who grew up in kung fu movies, to see whether I could levitate. I have failed to levitate, but I became a strong believer that the breath work itself was critical. It wasn't just a distraction. And then I asked myself and the people in my lab, we talked about, well, how can we study this? Because we basically try and understand breathing right now in rodents, and rodents pretty much breathe the way we do. It's not completely the same, but the basic mechanisms are there. And we said, okay, what can we do? We spent about three years trying to figure out how we can manipulate breathing in mice and then see whether it has an effect on the behavior. And after three years of postdoc in my lab, very dedicated woman Raquel Abreu found a way. And the way interesting, relative to your comments about volition, does not require volitional control of breathing. Basically what we do is we have a way to inhibit the prebotzinger complex on our command. So what we can do is take a mouse, and every couple of breaths, we can slow their breathing down, slow their breathing down by preventing the onset of the next inspiration. So they're breathing long, long pause. Breathing long, long pause. So this is sort of a breath work where they're Slowing their breathing pattern down. We do this 30 minutes a day for four weeks and awake behaving rats, excuse me, mice, and they, they tolerate it quite well. Then we turn the mice over to a colleague of mine, Michael Fanslow and Annie Hoffman, who are world experts on fear. And what they do is run these mice through a well vetted protocol on fear. And the end result is that only are the, the mice that go through this slow breathing protocol versus controls. And it's very important we have controls that control the mice who do everything exactly the same, except the breathing doesn't slow down. The control mice behave like mice. If they've been published hundreds of papers, they show a certain level of fearfulness. Our breath trained mice are much less fearful. Much less. It's really incredible how much less fearful they are. The other thing that we noticed is that mice psi and they have a basal PSI rate that over the course of four weeks the PSI rate goes down. The question is, why does the PSI rate go down? Here's our speculation. Your PSI rate is the sum of that necessary to keep your lung healthy plus an increment due to the fact that your hypothalamus is secreting these special peptides, these what are called bomba, simulated peptides that induce sighing. And so we all have an ambient level of stress. We're releasing these peptides and so that adds incrementally to our PSI frequency. Now if you take the mice at the beginning of our study, they have a stress level and that over time, as we get them through this bread training, we speculate that their stress level gets reduced. And as the stress level gets reduced, that component of sign gets reduced. These animals have a reduced rate of sighing. It's not giant because the majority of the sigh rate is due to what we need for the lung. But that modest component that would be due to stress gets reduced. So we just sent the paper off. We just resubmitted the paper. Fingers crossed. And what we're doing now is we're gearing up to do all the experiments that you're discussing. Like we can measure synaptic plasticity. So synaptic plasticity in hippocampus different in the mice that have been breath trained versus the mice that go through control. And being it doesn't involve volitional control, says that volitional control is not obligatory. And it's not saying volitional control is not playing a role, it's just saying it's not obligatory. So other, other aspects of breath control are playing, playing a role either direct effects of Pre Botzinger, or the fact that when you change the breathing rate, your olfactory signal changes because the olfactory signal is respiratory modulated and it's a powerful olfactory input to the brain. And so that could be changing. And so systematically we propose to study that. And I have to tell you that over the time I discussed this observation, but not disclose the details because we want to get it published. I've had dozens of colleagues who wanted to do their own experiments to see whether or not aspects of this breath work in mice has an effect that is noticeable. I think we'll be able in the next decade to answer those questions. And I'm sure you could come up with 20 great experiments that hopefully. And maybe some aren't even on our list. That. And please send it to me or please have the people listen to your podcast send it to us because the right idea is the key in doing great experiments. And we don't claim to know everything. And someone may have a perspective that would help us do a key experiment that would blow this whole thing open.

Let me ask a flow perspective question, because there hasn't been flow and respiration is not a particularly well studied concept, but one of everybody's, at least, especially at the collective. One of our very favorite flow studies was done by Orande Manzano. We call it's the piano study. It's flow during piano playing. It's a great study. He looked at all kinds of neurophysiological correlates. This is back in 2010. And what we found, what he found was that during flow, or at least during flow for piano players, you saw parasympathetic modulation of sympathetic activity. And he saw. And this seems to be very related to piano playing. I don't know if this would show up in sport, for example, in flowing like tennis or whatever, but we saw the increase in both respiratory period and depth and respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Right. So HRV was matching respiration. Do you think? So, one, does that make sense to you from your perspective on breathing and what you know of flow and. And two, do you think that's specific to flow and piano playing? Because every. I watch when I'm in flow while skiing, I'm always paying attention to what is my breathing doing. And half the time I'm panting like I'm not in my head, but I've just skied a bump field or something like that. And I can, like I'm gasping for oxygen, but I'm totally checked out, which doesn't seem to line up with, with what mano found.

So hold on, Jack, before you, before you answer that, I want to piggyback. So I'm going to give you a long time to answer this question. In our last 10, you know, sort of 10 minutes. Piggybacking on, piggybacking on that. You've done a work on interoception and well being. Okay. And I want to, I want you to couch your response in terms of the relationship between not only respiration and doing breath work and flow state, but this idea of interoceptive awareness and interoceptive sensitivity. And because I talk a lot about this to people about increasing these intercepts.

You define interoception just for the, for the people who might not know what it is before we go further.

So interoception is this awareness of what's going on inside our bodies, right? Versus exteroception is what's going on in the external world, right? So your movements of your gut, how tense your muscles are, whether your mouth is dry, your state, your emotional states, heat maybe in your body. So what's going on inside? And I could even go deeper down the rabbit hole, Jack, before you answer this, but I won't because maybe you'll give me a break and I'll ask this follow up question, but can you just couch that in terms of this relationship between parasympathetic regulation of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic flow state, respiration, and this idea of interoceptive awareness being correlated with higher senses of mental well being, which may facilitate flow.

Okay, I'll try and be terse. One of my pet peeves is that when people talk about breathing, they call it an autonomic function. Now, autonomic function we associate with parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, which have very distinct characteristics. They're, they're effectors of smooth muscle, cardiac muscle and glands, which is not what the effectors are for breathing. And we have a low, we have some smooth muscle in the airways, but with respect to the movement of air, it's all skeletal muscle. And so there's a lot of confusion about breathing and autonomic control. So I would lump breathing and autonomic control as what we would call regulatory functions that they're both vitally concerned with regulating body function, but in terms of trying to think how they work and interact, they're really markedly different. Okay. Breathing is a skeletal muscle movement. Autonomic function is about controlling smooth muscles, the release of hormones, controlling the heart. They are mechanically, functionally Physiologically very distinct, although ultimately they have to work in tandem in order to maintain health. And so there is a very strong interaction between breathing and autonomic function. We know, for example, in terms of vagal outflow, we get respiratory sinus arrhythmia. And respiratory sinus arrhythmia can be very strong depending on the health status of an individual. If you look at endurance athletes, they have very strong respiratory sinus arrhythmia, very slow heartbeats. And so we have to be a little bit careful about that now, saying that anything that changes breathing is going to have an effect on autonomic and sympathetic activity, either directly. So if you look at the anatomy in the brainstem, the brainstem is one of the, to me, the most interesting part of the whole brain, but it's highly neglected in study. The spinal cord is of great interest in part because we have a lot of people who unfortunately suffer from spinal cord injury and they survive and we want to do the best we can for them. And so there's a lot of effort to try and understand what's going on in the spinal cord for higher function. Well, that's who we are. We want to understand how we see things, how we recognize things and whatnot. I mean, that's part of the human condition. The brainstem is doing a, all the work of race body function. The thing is, and also with respect to higher function, someone has a stroke, they survive and you want to do something to help them. If you have damage to the brainstem, by and large, the likelihood of survival can be very limited. You have a stroke in the brain stem, the outcome is very poor. So we don't have a population of individuals who have significant damage to the brainstem that are available for either study as subjects like, okay, this part of the brainstem is damaged. What happens? So if you have damage to the part of the vagus that is going to the heart, that likely is going to impact parts of the brainstem which are close by. These things are all one next to each other. That's going to affect breathing, that's going to affect blood pressure. And so it just doesn't affect one thing. And so the interactions between breathing and parasympathetic activity and sympathetic activity, they're all cramped in right next to one another. And we know that they're interconnected. So the anatomical, the non anatomical substrate is there for the interaction. We have lots of physiological data. We look at sympathetic outflow, it has a respiratory modulation, parasympathetic outflies and respiratory modulation so anything related to breathing is going to affect these systems. Similarly, these systems can have an effect on breathing. I think we're in the process basically of rediscovering this. 20 years ago, there was a lot of effort trying to understand the brainstem controller sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, and somehow it reached a lull. And now there's renewed interest, I think, in part because the realization that many of the problems associated with dysregulation, particularly of sympathetic function, are not of peripheral origin, but of central origin. And so if we want to be able to find therapies for that, we need to know what's going on centrally. So I don't know if that really answers the first part of the question. The second part of the question about introspection, I don't really have much to say about that because I just don't have any personal research experience with that. Certainly a lot of the signals that are coming in are below the level of consciousness, and your body is able to respond. You have vagal input coming into the brain stem, and it fans out, fans out to lots of things in the brainstem that can affect heart rate, breathing rate and whatnot. There's no need in terms of an evolutionary sense for, excuse me, there's no need for me for one to consciously intervene in that. Now, that said, there's a lot of research effort spurred by NIH to try and understand introspection and the degree to which these enteroreceptors, one, influence our physiology and mental state, and two, whether or not the awareness of them affects how they work. So, you know, you're. You do a lot of things in terms of your normal function that you're. You're not aware of. You know, I, I grab something. I'm not aware of how my brain is implementing that. I just give an instruction, you know, to pick this up. And so the, the notion of awareness, from my point of view, I. I'm not aware of the, the data. And there may be a lot of data out there which is speaking to the issue, if you're aware of it. I know during many meditative practices, there's an effort to focus on different parts of the body, and whether or not that has a significant effect, I just don't know. So it's. It. I'm not saying it's not important. I'm just admitting ignorance. I think one of the problems about when scientists communicate to people who are not scientists, there's a notion that we know it all and won't admit ignorance. But it's you know, about the Dunning Kruger effect. Okay, so it's, you know, Dunning Kruger effect. You know, if you know a lot, you know what you don't know. And what we have to overcome is to admit that you don't know because people think that when you admit you don't know that it's because you're ignorant rather than aware.

Yeah, excellent, excellent comment on that metacognition.

So I don't know if I answered your question about introspection. I sort of punted on that because I just don't have any.

You circled around something. So there's a really cool study on London stock traders where they were, they found that the London stock traders were more, had greater interoceptive awareness, greater ability to measure, count their heartbeats, heartbeats per minute, which is the standard test of can you count your heartbeats? Right, that's the scattered interoceptive test. They were futures traders, which is a particularly volatile market. And they found that the traders who had greater interoception skills made more money and they lasted longer in the market versus controls. They, they, they before they went bankrupt basically. And what I always wondered after looking at that study and reading your work on enduroception is, is there. And you, you just said you can't answer this, but the curiosity to me is from a practical sense, is it better to count your heartbeats for enduranception or is it better to count your breaths and focus on your breath? They're both interoceptive things. Are there. This is sort of the cutting edge of a lot of the work that we're doing which is like comparative altered states. And I tend to agree with you that it's very, very individual. And I always say, you know, first rule of peak performance is what works for me is probably not going to work for you unless you're down to the level of the neurobiology. And it's shared across all mammals. It's very individual. So but you know, there's, there's crazy studies that say for example focus meditation amplifies logical linear thinking, open senses meditation, PASA meditation amplifies creative thinking or their loving kindness increases telomere lengths. Right. The caps and our chromosomes that are so important for aging and focus meditation doesn't. This is right where the field is right now. We're looking at comparative altered states for practical purposes. And obviously, maybe not obviously, but at least to me in reading literature and definitely in reading all your work, respiration and understanding the role respiration plays in all the individual altered states, trans all that stuff is going to be, I think, key to harnessing these states. Whether we're talking about flow or mindfulness or even psychedelics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera going forward. I think it's a, it's a huge part of the equation.

Okay, so let me make two comments. The, the study on the London Stock Focus is interesting. I would say the, the issue is you've, you've shown correlation. The question is whether there's causality. That is there's a causal relationship. These may be individuals that have lots of other characteristics that result in more interreception is the other characteristics that give them success. When you do an experiment like you guys do, where you take someone and you put them in a state where they become more aware and then you say, okay, what has changed in their various measurable parameters? That's a different kind of experiment because you're not pre selecting, you're not dealing with, you know, if I, you know, if I go look at the NBA, I say they're all tall. Well, they're not tall because they play basketball. They play basketball because they're tall. And so we have to get the arrow of causality straight. And as far as whether I were a betting man and say whether breathing or heart rate is more valence, the signals related. The neural signals related to breathing are more prevalent throughout the brain than heartbeat related signals. Now that said, there's a heartbeat by heartbeat physical movement of the blood vessels and we can neglect the effect that that has on various aspects of brain function. And so I, I can't say that the cardiac signal because the neuro, the neural component of it is not as strong that the effect is weaker. But if I say, okay, if I had to put my money all on one or the other, and of course I'm not an unbiased observer, I would put it on breathing.

All right, I think we wrap there. I think that's a good last quote.

Well, Guns, this has been a lot of fun. I hope it's useful to you and people listening to your podcast and I would certainly welcome any feedback and any questions you want to follow up. I mean, let's do that. Because there's lots of interested and motivated people listen to your podcast and they have questions that I actually may be able to answer.

Thank you so much for your research, by the way.

That's awesome. Thank, yeah, thank you so much for your research.

Yeah, that's great work. Well, you know, you're thanking me, but you realize you paid for it. It's your tax dollars. So I have to say thank you for your generosity.

Hey Jack, yell me five bucks. Okay?

I'm just saying. Yo, look, when we cross path I will give it to you in terms of some liquid refreshment. And it doesn't have to be limited.

You're giving away reasons to come to.

LA and it doesn't have to be limited to five bucks because basically nowadays all five bucks gets you is a thing of water. We can go a little bit higher than that.

Yeah, you might. You could buy me a Budweiser. Maybe if we go to the 7:11 but not a bar. It'll be Jack and me, we're drinking 40s on the corner. It'll be fine. We'll go to Englewood. We'll be blend right in.

You got it. You know where to find me.

Thank you for your time.

Bye now. Thank you.

Yeah, here.