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

Welcome to Flow Radio. I am Dr. Michael Mannino. I am the Chief Science Officer here at Flow Research Collective. Today I'm joined by my co-hosts, Flow Research Collective Executive Director and bestselling author, the one and only Stephen 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, 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. Uh, perhaps one of Dr. Feldman's most significant contributions include the discovery and naming of the preBotzinger Complex, which we may get into today. That's a key area in the brainstem responsible for controlling breathing rhythms. So, in this episode, we will explore 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 breathwork, 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 us off with a quick question. So, You recorded a podcast with Andrew Huberman 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 matcha. And, all right. Yeah. So, I think it could probably be— Well, that's a discussion perhaps for another podcast.

Let me kick us off with actually a science question.

There's a famous evolutionary biologist, Dobzhansky, 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 evolved 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, to procreate, and so on and so forth. And that puts a lot of very interesting perspectives on the way you think the brain works. No matter how long and 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 de novo 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 who 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 an evolutionary context.

And, Jeff, let me just clarify for a second what you actually just said. So, reptiles, they relax during inhalation, that happens sort of automatically and they use energy on their exhalation and humans are the inverse, right?

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 our 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 breathwork. So I wanted to ask you about that and sort of couch the, the rest of the conversation if we can, describing the science, but also prescribing, right? The practical application more maybe of an applied neuroscience approach, something that we can take away strategies, techniques, tactics to improve our wellbeing or improve our performance and maybe even better facilitate flow. So, this is related to 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 breathwork 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, and then maybe not versus, and the neural control of breathwork 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 Stephen 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. What do you think the cost to your family of not showing up in the world at 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 use with everybody from companies like Meta, Accenture, Audi, Bain Capital, all the way to the US 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 to 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 marked decrease in anxiety and 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, to offer the best you have to the world, you should check out Zero to Dangerous. It 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— we move 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 see that the control of these muscles is not just the simple pendulum rocking back and forth. It has to be much more involved than that to be able to go to all these various different modes. Now, one of the most important alternative basic forms of breathing are sighs. So as mammals, we sigh about every 5 minutes. Humans sigh about every 5 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, you 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 tube, 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, 2 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. So we have these 70 square meters, 400 to 500 million alveoli. They're all tiny. They're a fraction of an inch, a 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, they tend to— 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 blow, 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 gonna do it. You're gonna 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 to 500 million of them. So the reasonable number collapsing all the time. If you take an 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 5 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 5 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? And I and others have several ideas why we're doing that. One is that it's 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 to 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 the 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 they're sighing. 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 here, 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 someplace where you get— 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 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 brain-wide. 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 comes, 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 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 simulations.

Hold on a second.

Binding rides 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, in rodents and seeing that there's a change in their behavior. And so the, the one thing that breathing does that's different than gamma or delta or many of these other waves 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 3 to 6 breaths per minute during certain aspects of breathwork, 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 Huberman 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. So 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. And we see this in individuals who have serious clinical depression. It's hard to break. How can we break it? Non-pharm, let's non-pharmacologically. 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, 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—

Veronica Morera Morera says that it's good to, with psychedelics, it's good to shake the snow globe every now and again, right? That's a huge big pattern interrupt to the electoral circuits, et cetera.

Yeah. Okay. So undoubtedly there's a component of psychedelics where the interruption in the circuit could have the same effect. But if we're talking about things that are 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 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 with— and in their normal activity, you now disrupt it. So we know we're disrupting it because a single breath makes you calmer.

Okay.

Before you go give a talk to a big audience, before you propose to your significant other, before you tee off on the first hole of golf course. And we watch the Olympics before a race or competition. A deep breath or a few deep breaths 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 or 5 minutes at a time over a period of time, you can get with the right hemispheres, 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 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, breathwork 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. Yeah.

So, are you saying that volitional control, conscious control of breathing, various breathwork practices does that affect synaptic plasticity, neuroplasticity over time such that you can get better at that breathing technique and that has then effects neural—

Yeah.

So, Michael, I want to ask a related question, Jack. What I'm hearing you say is exactly what Michael said that you're getting synaptic plasticity and opening up with synaptic plasticity. Why are you, or maybe you are and I'm just Too dumb to get it. Why are you not just replacing with the 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, Jack, before you answer that question. So I think there was some research by Hassenkamp in 2019. There is some data showing that back to synchronization, that like 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, or form. They lower, and that might facilitate flow by the way. And it was not 3 seconds, it was not 4 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 what I find in speaking to people, it ranges from individuals who are very sophisticated about breathwork to people who know nothing about it. And so it's 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, then do a little bit more. And then when you feel comfortable, maybe you'll 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 would, would, could be optimized by a different training program. And I think it's probably the same thing with breathwork. What 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 an 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, I'm, 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, 5 minutes a day of breathwork for 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 recent your really excellent recent paper on breathing, emotion, depression, and opioids was phenomenal. I was so shocked to see the endorphins involved in it. It made sense when I saw it, but I was like, wait a minute, what are endorphins doing in the breathwork process? Is it always there? So can you Okay, so, you know, take 3 minutes to answer my questions, if you will.

Well, the, the, the, 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 a— or we did not have a good model to study this in, in 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 opioid 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 all hard to quantify. Now, saying that, about 5 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 100 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 on kung fu movies, to see whether I could levitate. I have failed to levitate, but I became a strong believer that the breathwork 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 3 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 3 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 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 breathwork where they're slowing their breathing pattern down. We do this 30 minutes a day, for 4 weeks and awake behaving rats, or excuse me, mice. And they tolerate it quite well. Then we turn the mice over to a colleague of mine, Michael Fanselow and Eddie 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 the mice that go through the slow breathing protocol versus controls. And it's very important we have controls. The control mice, we do everything exactly the same except the breathing doesn't slow down. The control mice behave like mice. 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 was— it's really incredible how much less fearful they are. And the other thing that we noticed is that my sigh— and they have a basal sigh rate— that over the course of 4 weeks, the sigh rate goes down. And the question is, why does the sigh rate go down? And here's our speculation. Your sigh 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 bombosimulated peptides that can induce sighing. And so we all have an ambient level of stress. We're releasing these peptides. And so that adds incrementally to our sigh 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 breath training, we speculate that their stress level gets reduced. And as the stress level gets reduced, that component of sighing gets reduced. So 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, so we just sent the paper off. We just resubmitted the paper, fingers crossed. And if it— 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 the 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-Potzinger Or the fact that when you change the breathing rate, your olfactory signal changes because the olfactory signal is respiratory modulated and there'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've 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 breathwork in mice has an effect that is noticeable. So 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, you know, 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, 'cause it's, 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 Mazano. 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 he found was that during flow, or at least during flow for piano players, you saw parasympathetic modulation of sympathetic activity. And this seems to be very related to piano playing. I don't know if this would show up in sport, for example, in flow in tennis or whatever, but we saw the increase in both respiratory period and depth and respiratory sinus arrhythmia. So, HRV was matching respiration. So, one, Does that make sense to you from your perspective on breathing and what you know of flow? And two, do you think that's specific to flow and piano playing? Because 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. I'm not in my head, but I've just skied a bump field or something like that and I'm gasping for oxygen, but I'm totally checked out, which doesn't seem to line up with what Lanzano found?

So hold on, Jack, 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 sort of 10 minutes. Piggybacking on that, you've done work on interoception and well-being. And I want you to couch your response in terms of the relationship between not only respiration and doing breathwork 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 interoceptive—

you define interoception just 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. And I'll try to 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. Their effectors are smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, and glands, which is not what the effectors are for breathing. And we have a little, 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. So 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 all the work of race, body function. And 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 brainstem, the outcome is very poor. So we, 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 a 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 gonna affect breathing, that's gonna 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 neuroanatomical substrate is there for the interaction. We have lots of physiological data. We look at sympathetic outflow, it has a respiratory modulation. Parasympathetic outflow as a respiratory modulation. So anything related to breathing is going to affect these systems. Similarly, these systems can have an effect on breathing. And so 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 control of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, and somehow it reached a, 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 brainstem. 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, but in terms of an evolutionary sense, for— excuse me, there's no need for me to, or 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 interoceptors, one, influence our physiology and mental state, and two, whether or not the awareness of that affects how they work. So, you know, you do a lot of things in terms of your normal function that you're not aware of. You know, 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 notion of awareness, from my point of view, 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, uh, 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, had a 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 interoception is, is there— and 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 interoception, 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 individual. And I always say 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. But there's crazy studies that say, for example, focused meditation amplifies logical linear thinking, open senses meditation, vipassana meditation amplifies creative thinking, or their loving kindness increases telomere length, right? The caps on 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, transit, 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 huge part of the equation.

Okay, so let me make two comments. The study on the London Stock Brokers is interesting. I would say the issue is 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 interoception. It's 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, you know, 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't neglect the effect that that has on various aspects of brain function. And so I, I can't say that the cardiac signal, uh, because the neuro, but 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 listening to your podcast who may have questions that I actually may be able to answer.

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

Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you. 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, you owe me $5.

Okay.

I'm just saying.

Look, when we cross paths, I will give it to you in terms of some liquid refreshment and it doesn't have to be limited.

You're giving me a reason to come to LA.

And it doesn't have to be limited to $5 because basically nowadays all $5 gets you is a thing of water. We can go a little bit higher than that.

Yeah, you can buy me a Budweiser maybe if we go to the 7-Eleven, 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 Inglewood. We'll We'll blend right in. You got it.

You know where to find me. Thanks, guys.

Thank you for your time.

Bye now.

Thank you. Yeah, here.