Breath is our body’s metronome, ticking from our first gulp of air at birth to our last exhale when we depart the Earth. Recently, scientists have begun to discover that this fundamental rhythm is also connected to many of our most critical cognitive and neural faculties, including memory.
But how does the connection between memory and breath work? Using EEG, a group of European scientists set out to answer this question. Their results detail an unexpected choreography: Memory retrieval, they found, is timed to the rhythm of respiration. People remember better if they receive a cue as they inhale while the memory itself seems to materialize on the out breath. They published their results in The Journal of Neuroscience.
For the experiment, the scientists taught 18 individuals to associate 120 images with verbs. The team—from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in collaboration with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the University of Oxford—subsequently asked study participants to recall the word-image pairs both before and after a 2-hour nap. While they were doing the recalling, the scientists recorded their breathing and their brain activity with EEG.
Read more: “Your Memories Are Like Paintings”
In the EEG recordings, the scientists found two brainwave signatures associated with successful remembering, and each was timed with a different stage of the breath. The first, a quieting of alpha and beta activity, was linked with preparation for memory retrieval, and corresponded with the in breath. The second signature was associated with the memory itself, and timed to the out breath.
In some people the synchrony was tighter between memory and breath, the researchers found, and these individuals were better at remembering. “Respiration is a natural pacemaker for memory processes, highlighting how closely our bodies and brains interact,” said Thomas Schreiner, study co-author and a psychology researcher at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, in a statement.
Could the findings help people remember things better in everyday settings? That’s a subject for future study, said co-author and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich graduate student Esteban Bullón Tarrasó. The current results only apply to recently learned material, he notes, so further investigation could look into how the breath affects older memories. “However, the underlying mechanisms suggest that respiration also plays a role there.”
After all, breath is one of the oldest rhythms, so it makes sense that it might help us travel back in time. 
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