“Brain-Breath” Interactions: Respiration-Timing-Dependent Impact on Functional Brain Networks and Beyond

Breathing is a natural process that we cannot do without and is also a daily action that sensitively and intensely changes under various situations. What if this essential act of breathing can impact our overall well-being? Recent studies have demonstrated that breathing couples with higher brain functions, i.e., perception, motor actions, and cognition. In particular, the timing of breathing can be a key factor to modulate accuracy in cognitive tasks and changes activation in specific cortical regions. To determine possible respiratory roles in attentional and memory processes and functional brain networks, we discussed several issues of interactions between breathing and brain function: i) respiration-dependent modulation of cognition and mental health; ii) respiratory rhythm generation in the brainstem (e.g., the PreBötzinger complex); iii) interpretation of the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal without respiratory artifacts using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); iv) respiration-timing-dependent effects on functional neural networks (e.g., the locus coeruleus, temporoparietal junction, ventral attention network, and cingulo-opercular salience network); and v) a potential application of breathing manipulation in mental health care. These outlines and considerations of “brain-breath” interactions lead to a better understanding of the interoceptive and cognitive mechanisms that underlie brain-body interactions in health conditions and in stress-related and neuropsychiatric disorders.