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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

"It's a start." I find it fascinating and very hopeful that Western scientific methods are beginning to be used to understand the significance of breathing.

Breathing is one of only two (or three) physiological processes that are both autonomic and volitional. (The other is blinking. I think there might be a third one but I forget what it is.)

It's a weird blind spot to have, eh? I mean, once you see it, it's weird that we (in the West) haven't been more interested in a systematic way in the effects of deliberate modulation of breath.

Why would we evolve to have volitional control over our breathing?

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>> I think there might be a third one but I forget what it is.)

Swallowing perhaps. As for why breathing is volitional, I can think of avoiding drowning and controlling the noise you make while hunting or being hunted. Same reason anything is volitional, our higher planning abilities can do a better job in many situations versus a hard-wired process.

Drowning usually happens in situations of panic and it's better if the defence mechanisms are controlled by autonomous reflexes, of which the most important one is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex

Eating, swimming, running, and other exercises require precise control of your breathing.

Is breathing truly volitional? I somehow doubt it and even if we can control it at times, it largely defaults to automatic mode. We have the power to modify the automatic mode through practice and the power of habit.

When I was younger I had a really bad experience with practicing breathing exercises, I was doing them unattended by an professional and perhaps excessively. It was a very very bad experience, momentarily I lost the ability to automatic breathing and was either forgetting to inhale or was hyperbentilating. It took about a month to go back to normal and made my life miserable during all that. I’ve since done it in a controlled fashion at a yoga center and the experience is different: one is aware of their breathing but doesn’t attempt to control it for more than one minute and if so perhaps gently for the duration of the exercise. Our brains pick that up and automatic breathing can and does get better

> The other is blinking. I think there might be a third one but I forget what it is

There are reports of being able to predetermine when we wake before we sleep; I don’t know if those are anecdotal or properly studied.

I assume anything related to stress, anger, or sexual responses are also consciously triggerable, given we can make ourselves stressed, angry, or horny by thinking about the right things.

> There are reports of being able to predetermine when we wake before we sleep

FWIW I can do that. At one point in my life I had to wake up a specific times (that varied day to day) and was using an alarm clock and I noticed I kept waking up exactly two minutes before the alarm was set to go off. I stopped using the alarm clock but kept waking up at the right time. It was like once I noticed I could do it I "had faith" that it would work and it did.

> I assume anything related to stress, anger, or sexual responses are also consciously triggerable, given we can make ourselves stressed, angry, or horny by thinking about the right things.

That's a good point, and it's broader than you say, that is, pretty much every physiological response can be controlled through self-hypnosis, "thinking about the right things". But that's different than the volitional control over breathing and blinking. Every normal person can choose to control their breathing or their eyelids at will in a way that they can't choose to control e.g their digestion or the rate of hair growth or their body temperature, etc.

> Why would we evolve to have volitional control over our breathing

Eating, mainly, I'd assume

If it were only that, it could still be autonomic (breathe while not swallowing). The hypotheses in this thread seem likely: speaking, or hiding from by predators/prey.

Is there any interest in the effects of deliberate modulation of blinking?

For speaking.

>"It's a start." I find it fascinating and very hopeful that Western scientific methods are beginning to be used to understand the significance of breathing.

Sure, but this article isn't it. It's a BS article, on a faux-journal, by faux-doctors. Take it with a homeopathic grain of salt in 20 cubic meters of water...

shatkarma:

1. breathing (agnisar kriya, kapalbhati)

2. blinking (trataka)

3. tongue (talabya kriya, kechari mudra)

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