A UC San Diego study reveals a precise link between breathing and brain activity that could improve understanding of disorders in which breathing becomes dangerously disrupted.
Breathing is often measured in simple terms, such as how many breaths a person takes per minute. But new research suggests that this misses something important: the detailed shape of each breath is closely associated with the shape of neural activity in the brain.
Researchers led by the University of California San Diego found that subtle differences from one breath to the next correspond with changes in electrical activity across brain regions involved in cognition, emotion, and memory. Variations such as a longer inhale, slower exhale, or brief pause were reflected in the pattern of neural activity.
“Every single breath is different,” said the paper’s first author Eena Kosik-Rose, a PhD student in the UC San Diego School of Social Sciences’ Department of Cognitive Science. “You can pause your breathing for several seconds, take a super deep breath, or have a shallow exhale. What we’re showing is that those differences in the shape of each breath are reflected in the shape of brain activity.”
Each breath leaves a distinct brain pattern
To examine that relationship, the researchers looked beyond breathing rate. They represented each breath as a wave, with rises and falls reflecting changes in airflow during inhalation and exhalation, then compared the shape of that wave with electrical activity recorded directly from the brain.
The study included 16 people undergoing clinical monitoring for treatment-resistant epilepsy. Researchers compared invasive brain recordings with measurements of breathing, including nasal airflow and movement of the chest and abdomen.
This allowed the team to test whether subtle changes in the timing, intensity, and shape of individual breaths were mirrored by corresponding changes in neural activity.
“Our results show that the coupling between breathing and neural activity is much richer than previously appreciated,” said Bradley Voytek, study coauthor and professor and chair of the Department of Cognitive Science.
Breathing and cognition are more tightly connected
The findings build on previous evidence that breathing can influence cognition. Earlier research has shown, for example, that people can perform slightly better on a memory task depending on whether information is encountered during inhalation or exhalation. Controlled breathing is also used to help calm people experiencing symptoms of PTSD.
The new study adds another layer by showing that the relationship is not limited to the timing of a breath. The detailed form of each inhale and exhale is also associated with the pattern of ongoing brain activity.
Dangerous breathing failures raise a new question
That raises an important question for future research: whether this close breathing-brain relationship changes in conditions where breathing can suddenly fail.
One of the study’s coauthors, Brian Dlouhy, a neurosurgeon at the University of Iowa, studies sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, or SUDEP, in which people with epilepsy can die suddenly.
Voytek said future studies could examine whether the relationship identified here becomes disrupted in SUDEP or sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, and whether changes in breathing might provide an early warning before breathing stops.
“Future research could investigate whether the breathing pattern provides a warning that breathing is about to stop in SUDEP or SIDS, said Voytek, who has affiliations in the School of Medicine’s Neurosciences Graduate Program and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute in the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing.
The current study does not show that breathing patterns can predict SUDEP or SIDS. Instead, it provides a framework for testing whether the normal relationship between breathing and neural activity becomes disrupted in these conditions.
“Now that we know that there is this incredibly tight and rich coupling between the shape of each breath and the shape of each brainwave, there’s a whole new world of options that we can explore,” Voytek said.
Reference: “Cycle-by-cycle respiration waveforms are coupled with the shape of neural oscillations” by Eena Kosik-Rose, Guangyu Zhou, Andrew Sheriff, Joshua M. Rosenow, Stephan U. Schuele, Chima O. Oluigbo, Saige Anabel Teti, Mohamad Koubeissi, Md Rakibul Mowla, Ariane E. Rhone, Sukhbinder Kumar, Brian Dlouhy, Christina Zelano and Bradley Voytek, 30 August 2026, Journal of Neuroscience.
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0731-26.2026
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