Neuroscience of the Breathhold

[klausi]

I made a brief video about the neurobiology of holding your breath. In brief, two regions in the brain stem, the pre-Bötzinger complex and the retinotrapezoid nucleus are mainly responsible for automatic breathing.

The motor cortex and the cerebellum are the regions responsible for willfully breathing or holding your breath. I speculate (albeit speculation grounded in neuroscience) that a strengthening of the connections from the motor cortex/cerebellum to the pre-Bötzinger complex and the retinotrapezoid nucleus allows seasoned freedivers to hold their breaths for so incredibly long. I don't think that these dots had been connected previously.

If you'd like to have more in-depth thoughts about the topics, plus some footage of freedivers, including a pretty good clip of my friend Emil sucking in his lungs, the video is here:

 

[kelemvor]

Could you verify that with imaging or does it require freediver cadavers in order to confirm?

 

[klausi]

Could you verify that with imaging or does it require freediver cadavers in order to confirm?

I try to stay away from cadavers, hehe. I think it could be tested with imaging, basically correlating motor cortex activity and medulla activity, in naive subjects and trained freedivers. I'm not sure if the effect is strong enough.

 

[Duke Dive Medicine]

It would be interesting to do functional MRI on free divers.

 

[klausi]

It would be interesting to do functional MRI on free divers.

Absolutely. While underwater might be too tricky to set up, but a breath hold in a scanner is of course possible. Do you have any functional mri groups at Duke who would be interested?

 

[Duke Dive Medicine]

Absolutely. While underwater might be too tricky to set up, but a breath hold in a scanner is of course possible. Do you have any functional mri groups at Duke who would be interested?

Ha, yes, I think an underwater MRI has yet to be conceived of much less invented, so it would have to be a dry breath-hold. I don't know whether anyone here would be interested. Would be a fun study though!

Best regards,
DDM