Dr. Jack Feldman

The degree to which they showed less freezing was as much as if there was a major manipulation in the amygdala, which is a part of the brain that's important in fear processing.

One of the issues, I think, for a lot of people is that there's a placebo effect.

That is, in humans, they can respond to something even though the mechanism has nothing to do with what the intervention is.

And so it's easy to say that the meditative response has a big component, which is a placebo effect.

My mice don't believe in the placebo effect.

And so if we could show there's a bona fide effect in mice, it is convincing in ways that no matter how many human experiments you did, the control for the placebo effect is extremely difficult in humans.

In mice, it's a non-issue.

So I think that that in and of itself would be an enormous message to send.

Right.

I want people to understand that when we're talking about breathing affecting emotional cognitive state, it's not simply coming from pre-Butzinger.

There are several other sites.

And let me sort of, I need to sort of go through that.

One is olfaction.

So when you're breathing, normal breathing, you're inhaling and exhaling.

This is creating signals coming from the nasal mucosa that is going back into the olfactory bulb that's respiratory modulated.

And the olfactory bulb has a profound influence and projections through many parts of the brain.

So there's a signal arising from this rhythmic moving of air in and out of the nose that's going into the brain that has contained in it a respiratory modulation.

Another potential source is the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve is a major nerve which is containing afferents from all of the viscera.

Signals from the viscera.