Patrick Obolgogiani (00:07)
Andrea, you’re a psychologist and neuroscientist by training. I’m curious if you had a dinner party somewhere, how do you describe your work and what you do?

Andrea Zaccaro (00:18)
So, hi Patrick. I am a researcher at the University of Chieti Pescara in Italy, in southern Italy. And I mostly focused my research on the ⁓ psychophysiological effects of slow breathing practices, then moving to the effects also of meditation, of meditative…

and contemplative practices. And now in my research, I’m more focusing on the effects of interception, and interceptive signals ⁓ arriving from the body to the brain. ⁓ Especially I’m more interested in the effects of breathing and breathing phases and breathing frequency on brain activity.

and consequently on brain functioning.

Patrick Obolgogiani (01:23)
Amazing. If I may ask, what sparked your fascination with this topic in the beginning?

Andrea Zaccaro (01:31)
So my fascination in the topic started at the university when I first got in touch with the so-called neuroscience of consciousness and the study of the neural correlates of consciousness. At the time, I was ⁓ practicing different kind of meditation ⁓ by myself without any guide.

And then later I discovered that these ⁓ meditation practices were already studied in ⁓ neuroscience as a neuroscience field, which is called contemplative neuroscience. And when I discovered mindfulness-based practices and research on that, and I was really interested in merging consciousness studies with meditation practices,

Patrick Obolgogiani (02:14)
You

Andrea Zaccaro (02:30)
and how they relate to each other,

Patrick Obolgogiani (02:33)
you

Andrea Zaccaro (02:33)
how, briefly, how meditation can induce non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Patrick Obolgogiani (02:40)
What was the main finding in the end from that? How can mindfulness basically alter the state of consciousness?

Andrea Zaccaro (02:47)
So, yes, mindfulness ⁓ and meditation can really modulate the so-called ordinary state of consciousness, and they do it by modulating brain activity and connectivity ⁓ in different brain networks. In particular, the most studied one is the default mode network, which is related to…

spontaneous mind wandering and to different self-related functions that are ⁓ indeed related to our self, in particular to our narrative self. So the ability that has mindfulness and meditation to reduce the activity and connectivity within this network can be related to the ⁓ ability to stay focused in the present.

Patrick Obolgogiani (03:17)
I think that’s that we can into a more successful and safe environment.

Andrea Zaccaro (03:45)
in the so-called present moment, here and now, but also to bodily sensations. So the ability of meditation to bring our consciousness back to bodily sensations and particular to breathing sensations.

Patrick Obolgogiani (04:03)
Super interesting.

How much, because I think you looked into the idea of breathing actually being a key factor of the mindfulness practice. At least with myself, I’ve noticed like, even though in many traditions, when you say mindfulness, your job is not to change your breathing. And yet you kind of do anyway, because you just, you know, look at it and it starts calming down. How much do you think the, of the impact of mindfulness is actually the breathing rhythm changing and how much is it like something else?

Andrea Zaccaro (04:38)
So it’s a very interesting but also complex question. Mindfulness practice and meditation practices ⁓ indeed modulate breath frequency. They reduce breath frequency automatically when people focus their attention on breathing. But in mindfulness-based practices, the idea is to just becoming aware of

the breathing pattern without modulating it. So the ability to observe the object as breathing as an anchor, to observe it without modulating it, is itself ⁓ one of the tools to develop some kind of meta-awareness. In this case, the awareness of breathing. While on breathing techniques, ⁓ the idea is to reduce

breath frequency ⁓ up to a certain rhythm and to maintain it. And this ⁓ has another kind of ⁓ correlate related to it. In particular, the reduction of breath frequency ⁓ is able to modulate the activity of our autonomous nervous system.

and our parasympathetic nervous system dominance will increase when we reduce breath frequency. But to reduce breath frequency, we need focused attention, which should be focused on a single object. So maybe the two mechanisms will overlap in the brain, in particular brain areas which are interceptive. So brain areas that are related to the

receiving an interpretation bodily sensation.

Patrick Obolgogiani (06:39)
I believe in 2018 you published this review, how breath control can change your life, right? What was the key thesis of that article?

Andrea Zaccaro (06:52)
So ⁓ in that review, we were interested in finding the correlates of slow breathing practices, the psychophysiological correlates of breathing practices, including neurophysiological effects as measured with the neuroimaging techniques like EEG or functional magnetic resonance imaging. But also we wanted to find the correlates at the cardiovascular level.

in particular the heart, the cardiac dynamics like heart rate, heart rate variability and respiratory sinus arrhythmia And finally, we wanted to see whether the changes in one or both of these ⁓ physiological ⁓ components were related to a psychological outcome, which, for example, yeah, reduction of

negative emotions, increase of positive emotions like joy, etc. And also to cognitive effects like the improved ability to focus attention. So basically we found that we had a bit of difficulty in finding papers that together show modulation at the physiological level and also at the psychological level. This was quite surprising for us. ⁓

But we were able to select some of them and we found that slow breathing practices were able to modulate brain areas and brain functions related to focus aid attention. Like we found an increase of EEG alpha power and also an increase in the activity of prefrontal regions that are both related to the ability of top-down focus aid attention.

And then we show also that slow breathing practices were able to increase heart rate variability. So in particular, at the high frequency in the high frequency range, which is commonly related to a dominance of the parasympathetic nervous system. So like a relaxation of the the ⁓ arousal, a reduction of the physiological arousal. And finally, this

Patrick Obolgogiani (08:50)
So thank you.

Andrea Zaccaro (09:15)
features were related to positive outcomes at

the behavioral and psychological level, like a reduction of anxiety, a reduction of the experience of stress and an increase of positive emotion and also an increase of subjective ability of focusing attention.

Patrick Obolgogiani (09:36)
And did it come down to reducing the breathing rate or were there other factors when it comes to breathing that made this possible to have more positive emotions?

Andrea Zaccaro (09:45)
We

Yeah, we focused on the researchers that showed a reduction of breath frequency. We selected those studies that ⁓ use it as low breathing practice, like we considered slow breathing as all the breathing frequency below 9 bpm, below 9 breath per minute.

Patrick Obolgogiani (10:02)
you

Yeah.

Andrea Zaccaro (10:17)
And so we were focusing on that, so slow breathing technique, explicitly discussed in the instructions of the participants. But I wanted to say also that we were surprised to find no mention of the fact that almost in 100 % of studies,

⁓ those studies included nasal breathing.

slow nasal breathing and not slow mouth breathing.

Patrick Obolgogiani (10:48)
you

Andrea Zaccaro (10:50)
And we asked ourselves whether this breathing pathway, so within the nostril, was related to the observer outcomes, both at the neurological but also at the psychological component of the outcome.

And another aspect that we didn’t find in literature was very interesting, was no mention ⁓ of the state of consciousness as subjectively reported by participants. So it is commonly known from centuries, especially from the Eastern traditions, that slow breathing are also meditation, but also slow breathing that are called pranayama breathing, pranayama practices.

are related to non-ordinary state of consciousness or meditative states of consciousness and we were surprising to find no study in Western literature in 2018 that studied explicitly this. So the non-ordinary state of consciousness is induced by breathing. So that’s why we did ⁓ other two studies on that, healthy participants, after this review of the literature.

Patrick Obolgogiani (12:12)
There’s a lot of directions we can go from here, but let me maybe follow up on double click on the nasal breathing because I remember reading in one of your papers, you mentioned this mechanoreceptors in the nasal vault. And I think so far, if you listen to people like Patrick Mckeown or Andrew Huberman, they talk about nasal breathing from the point of view of warming up the air, making it more moist and also avoiding over-breathing, which is much more easy to happen.

when you’re breathing through your mouth. But it feels like you’re pointing to a little bit different side, which is that you kind of somehow influence the brain directly. Can you just talk more about the mechanism here and what’s actually happening where we breathe through our nose?

Andrea Zaccaro (12:56)
Yes, there was an hypothesis started in the ⁓ 40 by ⁓ Nobel Prize-Hydrion ⁓ about the possibility that stimulating the olfactory epithelium in animals ⁓ is able to induce modulation of brain activity as well in areas not related to ⁓ olfactory

sensations. So this was ⁓ demonstrated by Fontanini and colleagues in 2003 and in rats. And basically they showed that stimulating the nostrils of a rat with a specific pattern of odourless air was able to induce a peak in power in the same frequency

in different brain areas of the animal, like in the olfactory primary cortex, but also in the entorhinal cortex, and also in the somatosensory brain areas. And now we know that this mechanism is made possible by some mechanoceptors that are located inside the nostrils in the olfactory epithelium, just below the olfactory bulb.

And these receptors respond to air pressure, even in the absence of odors. They just respond when we breathe in, of course, when we breathe in through the nose. So they transduce this information, this mechanic information to the olfactory bulb. And then from the olfactory bulb, they transmit this at the prefrontal brain areas, in particular at the orbitofrontal

cortex and from there there is the possibility that this pattern, which usually is a frequency pattern and it depends on the frequency of breathing, there is this possibility that this pattern is then transmitted from the frontal areas to the posterior brain areas. So in brief, it’s entirely possible and it has been most of the time demonstrated in animals and also in humans that

breathing at a specific frequency through the nose is able to modulate the frequency of oscillation in different brain areas that are not related at all to breathing or to olfactory processing, but are related to different other functions like ⁓ executive functions, but also perceptual functions. So this is really interesting how we breathe in through the nose is able to modulate our brain and our perception.

And this is not, in theory, we are just investigating this. This is not the case when we breathe through the mouth. So this mechanism is not present, of course, because the air does not pass anymore through the nostrils.

Patrick Obolgogiani (16:12)
Fascinating. Do you have any hypothesis of what might be the consequence then? You mentioned like the executive function, I guess then the assumption might be that if you breathe in a low frequency through the nose

then your executive function performs better. Is that the hypothesis or something else?

Andrea Zaccaro (16:32)
I don’t think there is ⁓ much research on focusing on the frequency of breathing and in particular by differentiating nasal breathing from mouth breathing at a specific low frequency. But I think there is a lot of research on breathing phase and breathing pathway, like in the differentiation between inhalation and exhalation when we breathe through the nose and through the mouth.

Patrick Obolgogiani (16:37)
Right.

Andrea Zaccaro (17:03)
And here we have a lot of data showing that inhalation is able to modulate some brain functions, some neurocognitive function like visospatial perceptual accuracy and also emotional recognition. So the ability to recognize ⁓ emotional faces faster. When we breathe in through the nose,

than when we breathe into the mouth, for example. But then there is a lot of research on how respiratory phases are related to specific brain functions. And some functions maybe seems to be more ⁓ facilitated by inhalation when others seem to be more facilitated by exhalation.

And more other functions seem to be facilitated by the transitions between phases. So the transitions between inhalation and exhalation and vice versa. So I think that studies focusing on slow breathing, comparing nasal and mouth breathing, we just did that when I was at the University of Pisa with the EEG. But I don’t think it has been replicated in the literature.

Patrick Obolgogiani (18:01)
This is.

Andrea Zaccaro (18:28)
yet.

Patrick Obolgogiani (18:29)
Yeah, amazing. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of research to be done around nasal versus mouth overall, even at alveos where we’re looking at if there’s any research around acoustically recognizing which one is happening based on acoustic signatures with spectrograms. And there’s literally two papers, I think, out there that we could apply. So we’re going to have to do a lot of the work ourselves. Fortunately, it does look like the

They have little bit different signature acoustically, so we should be able to ⁓ kind of differentiate between it with our sensor. yeah, lot of work to be done there. One area I wanted to delve into is the Poly vagal ⁓ theory, I believe, popularized by Steven Porges. I’m not sure how to pronounce his last name. Porges, which I know you’ve done some work in. Maybe just to start off, how would you describe the…

poly vagal theory for someone who doesn’t know what it is.

Andrea Zaccaro (19:31)
So ⁓ I don’t think I am an expert in polyvagal theory because ⁓ we ⁓ never cited explicitly that in our works. But what I can say is that there is this important focus given to the vagus nerve, which is the biggest nerve that we have in our body, which basically takes

Patrick Obolgogiani (19:44)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea Zaccaro (19:59)
all information from different body organs and systems and transmits them to the brain and also vice versa. Brain activity is able to modulate the functioning on our body and systems. The most common is the heart and how the ⁓ cardiac baroreceptor signals are sent to the brain and consequently

how the brain receives ⁓ pressure-related information, or information related to blood pressure, and consequently down-regulates heart rate and heart and cardiac output, so stroke volume. And in particular, this is related to respiratory sinus arrhythmia. That’s the reason why our heart increases ⁓ its frequency when we inhale and reduces its frequency when we exhale.

There is actually a theory which is related to how ⁓ slow breathing, ⁓ when we inhale deeply and exhale deeply, is able to trigger the activity of some stretch receptors which are located around our lungs, which are normally not active when we breathe spontaneously in a shallow way and in a fast way.

And this hyperactivity of these ⁓ slowly adapting stretch receptors at the lung level ⁓ acts like a specific vagal stimulation, ⁓ bottom-up vagal stimulation, which is able to modulate also the activity in our higher-order brain networks, like resting state networks, like the default mode network and the…

⁓ task positive network like front parietal network, et cetera, and also other attentional networks. So that’s why ⁓ slow breathing is able to ⁓ stimulate vagal nerve activity, parasympathetic dominance, and in a bottom-up way is able to regulate resting state networks, which by the way are the same network which are also implied in

mindfulness-based practices, so they are related to focusing attention and reducing mind wandering. So that’s why they a bit overlap.

Patrick Obolgogiani (22:28)
Hmm.

Amazing. And is that the main, you think, like if you think about the mechanism of breathing or breath work, practice techniques onto the nervous system, do you think that’s the main mechanism of those senses that are located around lungs or are there other ways in which we kind of activate the vagus nerve and then hence ⁓ influence the brain and the nervous system?

Andrea Zaccaro (22:58)
There is also for sure another which is very important, which is the increase of heart rate variability. So when we breath in slowly and breath out slowly for the differences in pressure at the thorax level, we also have a deeper reduction in heart rate during exhalation and a faster increase in heart rate during inhalation.

And this heart rate variability is also an index of how the cardiovascular system is able to adapt to contingent situations in our environment. And also there is an increase in this baroreceptor activity when we slow down our breath.

Patrick Obolgogiani (23:34)
Okay.

Andrea Zaccaro (23:50)
So an increase also in introspective cardiac information arriving to our brain, which is also able to stimulate ⁓ the introspective network. So these are two of the bottom

up mechanisms, which are related to slow breathing practices. But there is also another top down mechanism, which is very important. And that is the ability to focus our attention to our breathing and to our bodily sensations, which

which is itself an interceptive task. So it anchors us to our body and our bodily sensations. And this is another crucial aspect, which is, by the way, shared with meditation techniques. And then another mechanism which is related to ⁓ the slow breathing practices is indeed the nasal pathway.

So when we practice low breathing through the nose, we are also able to modulate that higher level ⁓ pathway starting from the olfactory bulb and going to the prefrontal areas.

Patrick Obolgogiani (25:03)
So one thing I wanted to go deeper into is the interoception, which I believe you’ve done some research around. mean, as far as I understand, you have extraception where we look at the senses, like the eyes, the ears, like what’s happening outside us. And then interoception is when we look inside, whether it’s the breathing or something else.

What have been some of most interesting things you’ve learned when you’ve studied interreception of human beings?

Andrea Zaccaro (25:33)
So interception for me was like the union point ⁓ between meditative practices and also slow breathing practices, because in some way they both ⁓ are related to our body and to our bodily sensations and to our bodily information. So when I move it to…

Patrick Obolgogiani (25:59)
So

Andrea Zaccaro (25:59)
the university where I’m working now and started to study interception. I was really interested in finding ⁓ respiratory interception related outcomes. And I delved deeper into the scientific literature about how respiratory signals, how respiratory interceptive signals can modulate

brain activity and

also brain functions and cognitive and perceptual and emotional functions. But I saw that most of the literature is related to how breathing is able to modulate the external perception of the world and also like emotions, ⁓ visospatial objects, etc.

I was interested in finding how respiration can instead modulate the perception of our body. So it’s a kind of introspective modulation of our introspective signals. So how respiratory phases are related to the perception of our body. Because like in meditation practices, in slow breathing practices, there is people that

there are people that report to being better able ⁓ to anchor to their body during a specific respiratory phase. ⁓ And in particular, as I found out later, these respiratory phases seem to be related to the exhalation phase and then to the transitions between exhalation and inhalation. So it seems that in this

specific phases, our brain, our neurocognitive system should be better able to detect bodily sensation and by extension it seems that it should be related to higher bodily awareness during exhalation compared to inhalation. And so that’s what we found here ⁓ in our ⁓ latest studies.

from 2022 to 2024, we showed that the perception of our heart, of our cardiac sensations, is improved when we exhale compared to when we inhale. And that was very interesting for me because it seems that ⁓ our breathing activity not only modulates how we perceive the world, but it also modulates how we perceive ourselves.

Patrick Obolgogiani (28:37)
So,

Andrea Zaccaro (28:51)
our bodily self in particular. So as a consequence, modulating breathing, this is just another proof that by modulating breathing, we can also modulate our mind-body ⁓

Patrick Obolgogiani (29:06)
⁓

Andrea Zaccaro (29:06)
connections, our mind-body relationships, which are related to health, course, to psychophysiological health.

Patrick Obolgogiani (29:16)
How do you think about that?

Like a different sort of interception because basically describing is by breathing slower, you can become more conscious of what’s happening inside, particularly on the long exhale and in between the inhale and exhale. How do you think about the people that might actually not want that?

Andrea Zaccaro (29:36)
So the question is, ⁓ it’s very complex and we still need studies and literature about that. But it seems that the interception should be located in the middle of a continuum, in the optimal position between very low interception and very high, extremely high interception. There are some ⁓ psychological disorders, some psychopathologies,

like schizophrenia and major depression, which are related to a reduction of ⁓ bodily awareness, of also interceptive accuracy, interceptive sensibility and interceptive awareness, ⁓ that should be related to… ⁓ that we should try to improve in order to reduce some symptoms, because this is also related to the ability of regulating emotions.

in particular negative emotions which are present in these disorders. But on the other side, we also have anxiety-related disorders like panic disorders or social phobia or generalised anxiety, but also post-traumatic stress disorders that seem to be related to extremely high, interceptive sensibility that can be also misinterpreted.

by the subject, by the patient, and often in a catastrophic way. So we certainly need to train this interceptive sensibility and we for sure need to develop personalized intervention, which can also be mindfulness and meditation related and also related to slow breathing practices ⁓ in order to optimize interception and interceptive skills in

in different disorders and of course in different people.

Patrick Obolgogiani (31:38)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So there’s like a pathway between both ends having

X percent of your awareness inside, but not too much. So you also keep in touch with what’s going outside and not get stuck with your inner world. Based on everything you’ve studied now in terms of breath work, if you try to summarize them into protocols, maybe we can almost take it from the point of view of different personalities and people having different objectives. Maybe we can start with someone who’s

Andrea Zaccaro (31:53)
Yes.

Patrick Obolgogiani (32:12)
high stress, they’re in a difficult job, they’re almost like, they’re nervous, they’re in sympathetic state, mostly, which then comes out in different ways when it comes to their breathing patterns and so forth, which hopefully we can then pick up with the wearable. What would be the breathing protocol you would give them based on what you know?

Andrea Zaccaro (32:35)
There will be many different ways of approaching, but in the case of a highly chronic, person, I will go for a slow breathing practice performed through the nose, both during inhalation and during exhalation. I have bit of expertise ⁓ in breathing practices called squared breathing or samavritti pranayama, which…

Patrick Obolgogiani (33:01)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea Zaccaro (33:04)
is related to four breathing phases, divided into four breathing phases like inhalation, pauses after inhalation, exhalation and pause after exhalation. All four of them should have the same identical duration. Usually it should be around five to six seconds, so it will be like a very slow breathing practice around four BPMs. But also there is a lot of

literature on ⁓ a little bit faster breathing techniques called resonance breathing, which I think is around six to seven breaths per minute. This is also very interesting. There is a lot of research by Lerner and colleagues showing this resonance breathing to be related to higher parasympathetic improved functions. So I will go for, I will try for this.

But another possibility also will be to make ⁓ breathing technique which includes longer exhalation compared to a slower inhalation because during exhalation ⁓ we have an increase of parasympathetic dominance and I think there are some studies showing that increasing the exhalation duration compared to inhalation

So the inhalation to exhalation ratio is beneficial compared to the other way around, so to longer inhalation than exhalation. But unfortunately, I think that literature is really, really scarce about this specific aspect at the moment.

Patrick Obolgogiani (34:51)
Perfect, thank you for that. What about someone who instead of trying to get into this relaxed state they actually want to focus? Maybe they care about performance, could be someone at the workplace, could be an athlete. Would you change your recommendation on the protocol for them?

Andrea Zaccaro (35:06)
Mm-hmm.

Maybe in people who already have ⁓ hypersympathetic dominance, maybe we should try to go for a focused-attention meditation practice instead, which is also known to be related to a relaxed, alert state of consciousness. So it’s just relaxed at the body level, but it’s highly alert at the brain level, ⁓ in particular in the…

⁓ peripheral brain areas at the task-positive networks, etc. So maybe it should be the case to not reduce, not to increase the parasympathetic dominance, which is already high, but try to go for more focused practice, like more focused ⁓ attention meditation practices. Or even…

Patrick Obolgogiani (36:06)
Hmm.

Andrea Zaccaro (36:07)
or even to yoga practice and to more active states like yoga and dynamic meditation practices like Tai Chi, etc. So this could be also very important to activate the body also at the muscular level, which is also being related to improved cognitive functions. So that could be the case.

Patrick Obolgogiani (36:32)
Makes sense. Are there any other protocols that you’ve applied in your own life perhaps as you’ve learned more about breathing and its impact on our health and life?

Andrea Zaccaro (36:43)
Yeah, we did some years ago a study in France when I was a PhD student at the University of Pisa about a Nidra yoga retreat, so a Nidra yoga protocol, which was taught by a really expert master yogi called André Riel ⁓ in France. And so we went, we basically went there

Patrick Obolgogiani (37:10)
So.

Andrea Zaccaro (37:12)
with one colleague of mine ⁓ with the EEG. And we stayed together with them

for one ⁓ week long retreat period. And we measured their brain activity and also their state of consciousness in these very long Nidra yoga sessions which are performed in supine position. So it’s like people… ⁓

go to sleep in that position, but instead they maintain a kind of awareness of their sleep. So Nidra yoga is also called the yoga of sleep or the yoga of dreams. And it is a very deep meditative state of consciousness, which is very interesting ⁓ and which I also practised myself quite often at home, but also in that situation.

And if you ask the participants of this specific form of ⁓ yoga, they often tell you that their deepest state of consciousness, their unified state of consciousness, also called non-dual awareness states, is very highly related to periods of spontaneous apneas. So a period of the cessation of breathing at all.

So the breath just stops for some seconds, spontaneously, without any effort. And in those seconds, they perceive a non-dual state of awareness, or a pure consciousness state. Consciousness without an object, just consciousness. And that is really, really interesting. And I think it should be studied more, that specific state of consciousness. But there is very few literature on Nidra yoga.

especially so deep ⁓ form of Nidra.

Patrick Obolgogiani (39:14)
Yeah. At least seems like Humeimann has been talking about this NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, which is based on nigriyodra. And hopefully there’ll be more studies on that, at least one form of it, sub-form. Maybe speaking of research, is there anything that you think a little bit more cutting edge on things you’re working on, want to work on? Like, what are the biggest unanswered questions that maybe about breathing in mind that keep you up at night or?

excited about things you want to delve into in the future.

Andrea Zaccaro (39:49)
One ⁓ very interesting question that we are now asking, and it’s a study that we are now performing, is the relationship between breathing and the subjective, the first-person experience in meditation. So we know that ⁓ there is a lot of literature trying to develop, also not new methods, to assess ⁓ brain…

sorry, to assess ⁓ respiratory related brain activity. how the frequency, and specifically how the phase of breath is related to the phase or amplitude of certain brain signals and specific brain areas. This has been done at rest, this has been done during specific exoskeptive tasks, but this has never been done during meditation.

So if we really want to, in my opinion, we really want to say that meditation is able to increase the link between the brain and breathing, so I think we need to start to develop some methodologies to assess breathing-related brain activity and how they change in meditation and how they are related to non-ordinary states of consciousness in participants. So that’s what we are now doing.

trying to do in our latest research.

Patrick Obolgogiani (41:21)
Well, that is getting deep, deep into what it to be a human, basically. Maybe on a similar point, ⁓ the more I study the topic of breathing, the more you understand how it affects everything in terms of biological systems and brain states and everything else, obviously, nerves and being a key one. I’m curious, like, if you think about beliefs that you have,

but those that are probably not yet adopted by majority of the population or even the scientific community, what do you think are the beliefs you have that are maybe most ⁓ unconventional when it comes to aspects of breathing and how it our systems and our health?

Andrea Zaccaro (42:09)
the most unexpected things to learn when delving into this topic was that breathing, how we breathe, is able to modulate the perception of the external world. Just the perception, just how we perceive things.

Patrick Obolgogiani (42:35)
Go deeper.

Andrea Zaccaro (42:36)
but

not how we breathe, not the frequency, but just the face. So people, we don’t know that when we do our stuff, our everyday life, we automatically and spontaneously modulate our breathing according to what we expect to perceive. So maybe if we expect to…

Patrick Obolgogiani (42:58)
Thanks.

Andrea Zaccaro (43:03)
receives some kind of information from the external world, we just inhale. And if we are good at doing this, we perceive it better, compared if we are not good to synchronize our body with the environment. So the degree in which we are able to synchronize spontaneously with the environment is just a very significant thing.

think of how we were just able to behave in that. So this is very important. And of course, this is not very well demonstrated because it has been demonstrated just in very rigid experimental settings. But we believe that this should be also true in our complex everyday world and everyday life. And…

I think that nobody even suspects this. So people don’t suspect that there is this possibility that our body is able to change so much how we perceive the world. And in particular, our breathing is able to modulate how we perceive the world. This is not ⁓ suspected, I think.

Patrick Obolgogiani (44:26)
Wow. That is quite a headline. I appreciate it. What about the opposite? I’m sure because you’ve worked with people in the world of yoga, breathwork and otherwise. What are some of the maybe misconceptions that people

in the world have about breathing that you don’t believe are quite rooted in evidence and might be like good to myth bust.

Andrea Zaccaro (44:52)
Sometimes we see that there are some ideas about breathing which are not really true. In particular, this is related to breathing techniques, breathing practices and how they can be performed by people. And sometimes you see that these kind of techniques are ⁓ thought to people

maybe automatically or even online without the presence of the master or of the facilitator or the expert. And I think that breathing techniques, especially when they go deep, when they become really slow or even faster, because there are also

Patrick Obolgogiani (45:24)
We’re giving out nine without.

Andrea Zaccaro (45:42)
breathing techniques that increase the breath frequency, I think that these kind of techniques should be learned ⁓

really with care and with caution ⁓ and should be supervised by an expert person who is able to teach them. Because I don’t think there is enough literature about the negative effects of learning these techniques in a bad way, but for sure there is some anecdotal evidence about the possibility to find some negative side effects of

of these breathing practices, especially when they are not learned correctly. And this should be very important. And another aspect is the idea, this overall idea that slow breathing can be considered a solution to our problems as a species or as a culture. In particular, could be considered a reduction of our stress as a whole or…

anxiety or depressive moods, etc. ⁓ It isn’t. ⁓ It indeed has some positive effects that we are going to study and already we already know some of them. But for sure, it’s not enough to to solve all of our problems. It’s not a panacea to everyone. It should also be better personalised.

to specific people or to specific conditions. ⁓ It’s not one take-all or like a simple solution for every problem that we have. We need more research on that. We need more studies trying to define how we can personalize breathing practices. Similar way what we said before, to increase, reduce breathing to…

associate it with movement. Also asanas in yoga, they are really related to breathing, but this is not very well known by common people. we didn’t share so much that asanas in yoga, in Hatha yoga, is really related to the ability to focus on our breathing and also to control it. So there could be very, very different ways of approaching this.

but for sure it should be personalized and we should also pay attention to positive side effects.

Patrick Obolgogiani (48:26)
Yeah, yeah, it’s sometimes the nuance is lost when you go on social media and you have like, oh, do this for this impact, and you lose the, lose the nuance of like, hey, yes, it works for I don’t know, 70 % of people, but then there is those 30 % for whom it’s not the ideal solution. So having the nuance of as you mentioned, personalization, and then not understanding the side effects for many people can be can be crucial.

Is there any area of your research that we haven’t covered and you feel it might be worth going into before we start wrapping up, Andrea?

Andrea Zaccaro (49:02)
I think

that we ⁓ didn’t ⁓ talk about ⁓ some kind of research that I did on meditation, in particular very expert meditators. When I was in Pisa, we performed a study on Vipassana meditation, which is very interesting, it’s a very interesting practice, but we were focusing on really expert

Patrick Obolgogiani (49:28)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea Zaccaro (49:36)
monks, so not common people, not novices or naïve or meditation naïves. ⁓ But yeah, I think we can also skip this because ⁓ we still don’t have solid results with that kind of study. maybe, I don’t know if it’s okay. We just have some conference

papers, some conference results, but not nothing published yet.

Patrick Obolgogiani (50:13)
If you’re comfortable talking about it, I would love to hear what are some of the potential learnings you have, at least from studying the monks.

Andrea Zaccaro (50:22)
So first of all, we found that it’s very hard for a very expert meditator to not going into a spontaneous meditative state. So it’s almost impossible to just relax and rest, which is commonly considered as a counter condition for meditation in research. So you have your meditation and you have your counter condition. And usually… ⁓

and not always correctly, ⁓ this control condition is ⁓ just rest, just mind wandering. But in these very expert monks, mind wandering is almost impossible and they just go deep into meditative states almost spontaneously. So they reduce the effort to go into that meditative state thanks to their practice experience. But interestingly, we found

When we investigated their first-person experience after the meditation, we administered some questionnaires, which are called retrospective psychometric questionnaires, that are related to the experience they had during the meditation. ⁓ Their experience was, of course, deeper, but in some way very similar to the Pranayama breathing…

experience that we recorded in another study. So basically these participants, I think the most striking first-person experience they reported was just this ⁓ effect of losing their body boundaries in a way just like their body was almost dissolving and merging into the space, into the room or even into the universe.

So there was the lack of this distinction, which is so deep that we have in our everyday life, between our self and the world, so the non-self. And in particular, at the deepest level, we have this bodily self that can be dissolved into the deepest meditative states of consciousness. ⁓ And this is very important because I think this is…

one of the first steps before reaching a kind of non-dual state of awareness, which is also related to enlightenment or also Samadhi states, which are commonly reported into the Eastern traditions of yoga and of also Buddhism, etc. So this was very interesting to find at the first-person level this kind of commonly reported

experience of losing our body, which is very interesting.

Patrick Obolgogiani (53:22)
What do you think mechanistically is happening? Is it the default mode network in our brain shutting down and then we kind of don’t know anymore that we’re us? Or what do you think is happening mechanistically there?

Andrea Zaccaro (53:34)
I’m just coming… ⁓ We have few research on that, of course, but one of the possibilities is the increase of the global connectivity between resting states network that commonly are not related to ⁓ each other, but they work like in a modular way. So there is this…

reduction of modularity in our brain network, brain networks, and the increase of the global connectivity. ⁓ And this should be also related to the lack of distinctions between self and other. And this has been reported not so many times, but sometimes in ⁓ deeper states of meditation, like non-dual meditation.

Patrick Obolgogiani (54:07)
Thanks.

Andrea Zaccaro (54:30)
And interesting also in experiences of ego dissolution that are commonly found in the psychedelic states. So when people take psychedelic substances and they have this very deep non-ordinary state of consciousness induced by the psychedelic states, I think there are some studies that show this reduction of anti-correlations between networks.

Patrick Obolgogiani (54:41)
Mm-hmm.

Stop.

Andrea Zaccaro (54:58)
So an increase of the correlations between them that are related to also the loss of bodily sensation and again the

distinctions between self and others.

Patrick Obolgogiani (55:11)
Hmm. It is fascinating how in a way there are multiple ways to get to the same place. You mentioned the psychedelics, but also the vipassana, which ultimately is just like paying deep attention to what’s happening. And then I recently interviewed someone who’s a breathwork facilitator and they were talking about doing deep conscious breathing in a very deep way, very quite fast. And obviously you might know, but doing that kind of breathing techniques basically gets you to the same place in

typically like 15 minutes ⁓ or less. the end state seems to be very similar across those three modalities. So there’s something interesting where something is being affecting the brain to get us to the state where we lose sense of our body and ourselves. yeah, that’s probably a beautiful place to start closing in. ⁓ Andrea, of course, people can search for your name and find all the work you do. Is there any specific location where you want to point people to if they want to learn more?

about the work.

Andrea Zaccaro (56:13)
I think that they can look for, if they’re interested in going deeper into the research that we published, ⁓ there is my ResearchGate page, which is a common social network used by people into research. They can just look for my name and also download, I think, all the papers that we publish in our open access. So they can download them for free, the PDF and read them.

Patrick Obolgogiani (56:41)
It’s amazing.

Awesome. Well, thank you again for your time and really interesting insights. ⁓ As well as the work you do, I think it’s, as you mentioned, very much understudied. And hopefully, you know, we can give tools for people that can use because ultimately breathing is free, free tool that everyone can can apply in their life. And as you mentioned, there’s so many ways in which we can impact in a positive way. So if we learn more about what are the different modalities and the ways it works.

It can probably guide us into designing optimal programs for different types of people. So very much looking forward to seeing all the work you do and going forward. But for now, thank you for your time and for everyone listening. Thanks for tuning in. I’ll see you all later on.

Andrea Zaccaro (57:30)
Thank you very much, Patrick. See you soon. Thank you.

Patrick Obolgogiani (57:34)
See you soon.