STANFORD — Ohmmmmmmmm.
Feel better?
Thank your pre-Bötzinger complex.
That’s home to a cluster of brain cells — newly identified by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers — that connect breathing to your state of mind.
Notice how loooong slow breaths help you face an inbox full of unread emails? That one type of cell at work.
Feel how fast and frantic breaths make you anxious? Blame another type of cell.
This breathing center has a direct and dramatic influence on higher order brain function, the researchers found. They hope their discovery, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, leads to treatments to suppress anxiety, depression, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder and all kinds of negative emotions.
For centuries yogis have used breath control, or pranayama, to promote concentration, mental clarity and patience. Buddha advocated breath-meditation as a way to reach enlightenment.
The Stanford team, led by former graduate student Dr. Kevin Yackle, wanted to know why.
So they set out to discover how a cell’s behavior can make you feel like you’re sitting on a train track. Or relaxing in your jammies with a glass of red wine.
The team combed public databases to assemble a list of genes that are activated in the part of the mouse’s brain — the pre-Bötzinger complex, dubbed “preBötC” — where the breathing-control center resides.
There they found more than 60 subtypes of brain cells.
What do all these different cells do? To find out, they selectively killed cells in mouse brains to see if breathing patterns changed — that is if the mice sighed more and sniffed less.
Bingo: Zen mice.
Removal of these cells didn’t affect normal breathing, Instead, it left animals unusually calm.
“If you put them in a novel environment, which normally stimulates lots of sniffing and exploration,” Yackle said in a prepared statement, “they would just sit around grooming themselves.” (That’s what mice do when they’re relaxed.)
The mice still sniffed around their cage. But there was a change in relative proportions of sighing and sniffing behaviors. There were fewer fast “sniffing” breaths and more slow, sighing breaths associated with grooming and chilling out.
The investigators don’t think these newly identified cells actually regulate breathing.
Rather, they seem to report back to another brain structure, called the locus coeruleus. There is a “pranayama pathway” that directly connects the breathing center to this structure and the rest of the brain. That’s how we get messages to practically every part of the brain to be aroused: waking us from sleep, keeping us alert and triggering anxiety and distress. It’s also how we connect with the cells that keep steady rhythmic timing, correlating to slow breathing.
When these cells are busy working, you can unwind.
Namaste, preBötC.
