Babies Do It. So Do Fitness Trainers. Now Scientists Say It Might Even Improve Memory.

Babies do it. Yoga practitioners swear by it. Fitness instructors say it aids in oxygenation during exercise. Scientists are even touting it for predicting the likelihood of dementia. And now researchers are even claiming that the way we breathe may affect how well our memories are consolidated. Maybe there really is something to breathing through your nose. Neuroscientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden recently reported in The Journal of Neuroscience that if we breathe through the nose rather than the mouth after trying to learn a set of smells, we remember them better. As studies into how breathing affects the brain—many of which have concentrated on memory—have gained traction in recent years, researchers scrutinizing the link between smell and memory have determined for the first time that participants who breathe through the nose consolidate their memories better. “Our study shows that we remember smells better if we breathe through the nose when the memory is being consolidated – the process that takes place between learning and memory retrieval,” said Artin Arshamian , researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet . “This is the first time someone has demonstrated this.” The phenomenon hasn’t been studied before, according to researchers, because the most common laboratory animals—rats and mice—cannot breathe naturally through their mouths. For this study, neuroscientists charged participants with learning twelve different smells on two separate occasions. Subjects were then asked to either breathe through their noses or mouths for one hour. Following the experiment, participants were presented with the old as well as a new set of twelve smells, and asked to report if each one was from the learning session or a new smell. “The results showed that when the participants breathed through their noses between the time of learning and recognition, they remembered the smells […]

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