A sprinter’s first task is to react to the starting pistol. Now, a button-clicking experiment suggests that how quickly people respond to a cue may depend in part on whether they’re breathing in or out.
Volunteers’ reaction times were faster when they exhaled or held their breath compared with when they inhaled, researchers report September 28 in iScience.
Ken Paller and Erika Yamazaki, then both cognitive neuroscientists at Northwestern University, made their discovery while studying breathing patterns to find treatments for sleep apnea. Yamazaki graduated from her PhD earlier this year.
Paller...
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