Dr. Jack Feldman

So you have to take a big inhale.

And what nature has done is instead of requiring us to remember to do it, it does it automatically.

And it does it about every five minutes.

If you look at the progression of any mammal to a death due to, quote, natural causes, their breathing slows down,

it will stop and then they'll gasp.

So we have the phrase dying gasp.

Super large breaths.

They're often described as an attempt to auto-resuscitate.

That is, you take that super deep breath and that maybe it can kickstart the engine again.

We do not know the degree to such things as gasp are really size that are particularly large.

And so if you suppress the ability to gasp,

in an individual who is subject to an overdose, then whereas they might have been able to re-arouse their breathing, if that's prevented, they don't get re-aroused.

So that is certainly a possibility.

This is a topic which has really intrigued me over the past decade.

I would say before that I was in my silo just interested about how the rhythm of breathing is generated and didn't really pay much attention to this other stuff.

For some reason I got interested in it.

I felt maybe I can study this in rodents.

So we got this idea that we were going to teach rodents to meditate.

And that's laughable, but we said, but if we can, then we can actually study how this happens.

So I was able to get a sort of a starter grant, an R21 from NCCIH.