Breathing In Improves Memories

Memories formed while a person is inhaling stick around longer than memories formed while a person in exhaling. Breathe in now to remember that researchers at Northwestern University showed a group of healthy volunteers a series of faces depicting either fear or surprise. For each one, the subjects had to indicate as quickly as possible which emotion was showing on the screen; as the researchers timed them, they also tracked their breathing patterns and brain activity. A Northwestern news release reports that researchers found that for the fear faces, people had faster reaction times when they were inhaling through the nose than when they were exhaling (the same trend didn’t hold for the surprised faces, or when the subjects were mouth-breathers). In another experiment, people told to remember a string of images could later recall more of them if they’d originally memorized the pictures while inhaling. The researchers came away suspecting that one of the key elements of the fight-or-flight response — the rapid breathing that allows us to supply our bodies with extra oxygen — may also have a mental benefit, helping us both to spot threats quickly and to effectively file them away for later recall.