You probably don’t spend much time thinking about the way you breathe. Unless you make a conscious effort to modulate your breathing, it’s an involuntary function, controlled by the autonomic nervous system to ensure that your body has a constant supply of oxygen and is able to remove carbon dioxide.
Intriguingly, the way you breathe is highly individualized. Emerging research suggests that everyone appears to have a distinctive breathing pattern, to the extent that this pattern, if monitored over a long enough time period, could be used for identification purposes, similar to fingerprints, tongue ridges, and iris patterns.
Neurobiologists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science hypothesized that due to the highly individualized nature of the human brain, which controls respiration, each person’s pattern of inhaling and exhaling would also be unique. To test this theory, 100 study participants wore a device, created especially for this research, that recorded their nasal airflow, including details such as the amount of air passing through each nostril, the time between breaths, and breath duration. The participants wore the device for 24 hours and recorded their daily activities (including periods of sleep) in an app.
Using a machine learning program, the researchers were able to identify the individuals based on these breathing patterns with almost 97% accuracy. This incredibly accurate result was repeated across numerous retests.
Based on respiration patterns, they were also able to accurately determine the amount of exertion the participants were undergoing, as well as traits like body mass index. More surprisingly, they also noticed a correlation between breathing patterns and self-reported levels of anxiety and depression.
Specifically, individuals who reported more depression symptoms on a questionnaire tended to exhale more quickly. Those with higher anxiety scores had shorter inhales and more varied breath duration when sleeping.
The researchers are currently investigating the link between respiration patterns and illness, with the hope of discovering whether regulating breathing may help with certain physical and mental health conditions. They want to determine whether, by modifying their breathing patterns, individuals can improve their mental health and overall well-being.
Amazing facts about breathing:
- The average person breathes in and out roughly 22,000 times per day.
- The lungs are the only organ in the human body that can float on water, due to the presence of millions of air-filled structures called alveoli.
- The left lung is slightly smaller than the right lung to accommodate the position of the heart in the chest cavity.
