Not Every Breath Is the Same

Nose, mouth, diaphragm, posture, defense, attention, and the time lived by the Body-Territory

In the previous blog, we divided one breath into four phases:

inhale
→ hold full
→ exhale
→ hold empty.

It seemed simple.

But now another problem appears.

Two people may breathe eight times per minute and still be producing physiologically different breaths.

One breathes through the nose.

Another through the mouth.

One moves predominantly through the upper chest.

Another shows greater abdominal participation.

One moves a large volume of air.

Another breathes shallowly.

One keeps the chest, abdomen, and diaphragm relatively free.

Another briefly interrupts movement whenever attention intensifies, work becomes demanding, or a threat appears.

Respiratory rate does not tell the whole story.

Not every breath is the same.

Breathing Through the Nose Is Not the Same as Breathing Through the Mouth Through a Different Entrance

Both nose and mouth can conduct air to the lungs.

But the pathways are not physiologically identical.

The nose participates in warming, humidifying, and filtering inspired air. The paranasal sinuses are also important reservoirs of nasal nitric oxide — nNO.

A 2023 review shows that NO concentrations in the paranasal sinuses can be much higher than those found in the lower airways. During nasal breathing, part of this NO contributes to airflow through the nasal cavity and may reach the respiratory tract. Nitric oxide participates in local mechanisms related to airway regulation and defense.

But we should avoid an easy conclusion:

“nasal breathing increases NO, therefore lowers blood pressure.”

That chain is not established in such a simple form.

The local effects of nasal NO cannot automatically be translated into a claim of systemic cardiovascular benefit.

What we can say is more interesting:

when we change the route of breathing, we also change part of the physics, chemistry, and sensory information that accompanies the air.

There is also evidence that nasal breathing participates in neural oscillations synchronized with the respiratory cycle. A 2023 study showed that this coupling can be identified even with scalp EEG.

Breathing begins in the territory, but the way the territory enters also matters.

Breathing High and Breathing Low

Place one hand on the upper chest.

Place the other on the abdomen.

Breathe normally.

Which one moves more?

In everyday language, we may call breathing “high” when movement is more evident in the upper thorax and “low” when there is greater abdominal and lower rib-cage participation.

But we need a correction.

This does not mean that air is entering only the “upper” or “lower” part of the lungs.

What we are observing externally is how different regions of the Body-Territory participate in the mechanics required to produce ventilation.

This is exactly why, in our future experimental design, one respiratory band will not be enough.

We want at least:

**thoracic band

• abdominal band

• respiratory airflow.**

This will allow us to observe not only how often someone breathes, but how the thorax and abdomen coordinate throughout each cycle.

Diaphragmatic Breathing Does Not Mean Pushing the Belly Out

The diaphragm is the main inspiratory muscle in mammals.

When it contracts, it generates more negative intrathoracic pressure and more positive abdominal pressure, contributing to thoracic expansion and airflow into the lungs. A major physiological review published in 2025 details the diaphragm’s role as an inspiratory pump and its integration with other respiratory muscles.

This is why the abdomen often moves during inspiration.

But:

the abdomen moving as a consequence of diaphragmatic action

is not necessarily the same as:

voluntarily pushing the belly outward.

A person may try to perform a “perfect diaphragmatic breath” and, in trying to do it correctly, create more tension and control than freedom.

This will matter in our experiments.

We do not want to decide that a breath is good simply because it looks correct from the outside.

We will need to observe:

**movement

• airflow

• volume

• CO₂

• effort

• first-person experience.**

Posture Also Participates in Breathing

The diaphragm does not exist in isolation.

It separates the thoracic and abdominal cavities and works in relation to the rib cage, abdominal muscles, spine, and pressure changes across those cavities.

Changing body position changes these relationships.

A Brazilian study published in 2022 showed that different body positions modified pulmonary function parameters even in healthy adults.

So perhaps the question:

“How do you breathe?”

is incomplete without:

“In what position is your body able to breathe?”

Imagine a person sitting for many hours in front of a screen.

Hips barely moving.

Spine showing little variation.

Head projected forward.

Arms working within a very narrow spatial range.

Now compare that with walking, running, squatting, lying down, carrying weight, talking, or climbing a mountain.

Respiratory demand changes.

But the mechanical possibilities offered to the body also change.

In that sense:

the chair enters the breath.

The screen enters.

Work enters.

Clothing enters.

The territory enters.

Short Does Not Mean Shallow. Slow Does Not Mean Deep.

Another confusion needs to disappear.

Respiratory rate indicates how many cycles occur per minute.

Tidal volume describes approximately how much air is moved during each cycle.

And what strongly influences CO₂ is alveolar ventilation, which depends on the volume effectively reaching gas-exchange regions, respiratory rate, and dead space.

So someone may breathe:

rapidly and shallowly,

rapidly and deeply,

slowly and deeply,

slowly with a small volume.

These four patterns will not necessarily produce the same physiology.

A person may breathe slowly and still overventilate if each breath is extremely large.

Another may breathe faster with small volumes without producing the same reduction in CO₂.

Therefore:

respiratory rate alone does not tell us whether someone is hyperventilating.

This point will become central in the next blog.

And What Happens When the Thorax and Abdomen Stop Moving Together?

Normally there is some degree of coordination between thoracic and abdominal compartments.

When this relationship changes, we can observe thoracoabdominal asynchrony.

In more pronounced cases, paradoxical movement may appear.

But again, we need to avoid turning description into judgment.

Respiratory patterns can change because of obstruction, effort, neuromuscular disease, pain, posture, exercise, and many other factors.

In 2023, Elke Vlemincx proposed understanding so-called “dysfunctional breathing” dimensionally: not simply as the presence or absence of a wrong pattern, but within a continuum of respiratory adaptability.

This perspective fits our question very well:

perhaps healthy breathing is not one fixed form, but the ability to change when the need changes.

There Is Also a Breath That Almost Freezes

Imagine you are writing.

An unexpected message arrives.

For a moment, respiratory movement decreases.

Or you are crossing a street.

You hear a horn.

Before consciously formulating:

“there is danger,”

the organism has already changed movement, attention, and posture.

This does not mean that “fear is stored in the diaphragm.”

We do not have evidence to claim that.

But breathing, attention, neural networks, and defensive behaviors interact.

A study involving researchers from the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte showed, in an animal model, that anxiety-like states were associated with different respiratory patterns and altered coupling between breathing and activity in prefrontal regions.

The more careful formulation is:

the body can learn respiratory and motor strategies that were useful in particular contexts.

Fear.

Urgency.

Pain.

Vigilance.

Work.

Concentration.

Speech.

Sport.

Ritual.

Culture.

With repetition, some strategies may become more available than others.

We do not need to imagine an emotion trapped inside a muscle.

We can investigate an organism that has learned certain possibilities of movement.

Respiratory Freedom May Mean Having More Than One Response Available

Imagine a Body-Territory that can:

increase ventilation to run,

use greater abdominal participation at rest,

take a rapid inhalation when needed,

lengthen an exhalation,

briefly hold the breath to stabilize the trunk,

and then release that hold.

There is repertoire.

Now imagine another organism responding to most situations with:

little abdominal movement,

a rigid chest,

short breathing,

a clenched jaw,

little variability.

The problem may not lie in any one of these characteristics by itself.

It may lie in the reduction of available possibilities.

At BrainLatam, we have proposed:

the body needs space to signal.

This does not mean that freedom of movement “releases stored emotions.”

It means something more testable:

when the organism has more possibilities for movement, perhaps it can produce and differentiate more bodily states.

That is an experimental question.

Not a therapeutic conclusion.

Breathing May Also Change the Space in Which Time Is Lived

Now we reach a difference that no respiratory band can measure by itself.

Imagine a four-second exhalation.

On the computer:

4.000 seconds.

Produce one exhalation while thinking about a message on your phone.

Then produce another with the same physical duration, but direct attention toward abdominal movement, airflow, temperature at the nostrils, and the emerging urge to inhale again.

The clock may record nearly the same duration.

But was it the same lived time?

Brazilian researcher André Cravo, from the Federal University of ABC, has built a research program dedicated to the perception and use of time.

In a large Brazilian longitudinal study published in Science Advances in 2022, Cravo and colleagues showed that the experience of the passage of time during social isolation was related to subjective states and lived experience, reinforcing that chronological duration and experienced time are not equivalent.

In 2024, Fernanda Bueno, Anna Nobre, and André Cravo used EEG to investigate how durations are represented when temporal information must serve different tasks. The results suggested both shared temporal components and task-dependent signatures.

These studies do not demonstrate the BrainLatam model.

They allow us to enter into dialogue with it.

The 3D Space of the Body-Territory

In BrainLatam’s 5D Consciousness model, 3D is the material space of the Body-Territory.

It is not an imaginary mental screen.

When a stimulus is processed, something physically happens in that organism.

There may be:

redistribution of molecules,

ATP consumption and the production of metabolic byproducts,

changes in ionic gradients,

changes in blood flow,

oxygenation,

CO₂,

muscle tension,

posture,

pressure,

temperature,

movement.

These changes may be distributed and may occur across different scales.

Some will reach perception.

Others will remain below it.

But the fact that they do not gain qualia does not mean that the processing failed to produce a material configuration in the organism.

This is the sense in which BrainLatam uses the concept of pre-activated spaces.

Attention does not need to create these representations from nothing.

It can:

activate,
pre-activate,
prioritize,
or increase the differentiation

of bodily configurations that have already been processed or are available.

So our formulation of lived time becomes more precise:

In the BrainLatam hypothesis, lived time emerges from the movement of pre-activated material representations within the 3D space of the Body-Territory — changes in metabolism, molecules, flows, tensions, and movements that may or may not reach conscious perception. When we direct attention toward breathing, part of these already ongoing configurations may gain priority, greater differentiation, and qualia.

Respiratory interoception provides an important bridge for this question.

A 2024 review shows that perceiving breathing involves multiple somatic, visceral, and motor-related signals integrated within discriminative and affective systems. There is no single “internal breathing sensor.”

This means that attending to an exhalation may make the following more differentiable:

movement,

pressure,

temperature,

tension,

flow,

heartbeat,

the need to inhale.

The four seconds remain four seconds on the clock.

But more changes may acquire qualia within them.

In the BrainLatam hypothesis:

the clock measures the interval.

The Body-Territory lives the movement of the differences it is able to perceive.

The 5D Body-Territory formulation itself already proposes that lived time derives from the dynamics of internal spaces: representations may gain or lose priority, approach or move away, combine, and return as memory.

Now we have a question that can be taken to the laboratory:

if we keep breathing physically similar but change where attention is directed, will the perceived duration of that interval also change?

This creates a concrete possibility for dialogue between First-Person Consciousness, psychophysics of time, EEG, fNIRS, and respiratory physiology.

We Are Not Looking for the Perfect Breath

Our future experiment does not need to ask:

“Which technique is best?”

We can ask something much more open.

What happens when we compare:

nasal and oral,
thoracic and abdominal,
short and long,
fast and slow,
deep and shallow,
coordinated and asynchronous,
free and intentionally controlled,
with and without pauses?

And record simultaneously:

**thorax + abdomen + airflow

• ECG/RespHRV

• CO₂ + SpO₂

• blood pressure

• EEG + NIRS

• attention

• perceived time

• first-person report.**

We are not trying to discover one universally correct form of breathing.

We want to discover:

which movements this Body-Territory has available — which it uses spontaneously, which it has learned to repeat, and which it can still choose when the world changes.

Perhaps breathing better does not mean learning one correct way to breathe.

Perhaps it means recovering enough possibilities so that breathing itself can change when life changes.

Main References

SPECTOR, B. M.; SHUSTERMAN, D. J.; ZHAO, K. (2023). Nasal nitric oxide flux from the paranasal sinuses. Current Opinion in Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 23(1), 22–28.
Shows the paranasal sinuses as important nitric oxide reservoirs and clarifies contemporary mechanisms of NO transport into the nasal cavity, supporting real physiological differences between nasal and oral routes.

WATANABE, T. et al. (2023). Observation of respiration-entrained brain oscillations with scalp EEG. Neuroscience Letters, 797, 137079.
Demonstrates that respiration-coupled oscillations can be detected with scalp EEG, providing an experimental basis for linking respiratory phase with electrical brain activity.

SIECK, G. C.; FOGARTY, M. J. (2025). Diaphragm muscle: a pump that can not fail. Physiological Reviews, 105(4), 2589–2656.
Provides a contemporary review of diaphragm mechanics and neural control, supporting its role as the main inspiratory pump and its integration with thoracic and abdominal pressure changes.

BARBOSA, A. W. C. et al. (2022). The effects of different body positions on pulmonary function in healthy adults. Fisioterapia em Movimento, 35.
Brazilian research showing that body position changes pulmonary-function parameters even in healthy individuals, reinforcing that posture and breathing cannot be treated as fully independent processes.

VLEMINCX, E. (2023). Dysfunctional breathing: a dimensional, transdiagnostic perspective. European Respiratory Journal, 61(6), 2300629.
Proposes understanding dysfunctional breathing as a continuum of adaptability, supporting our choice to investigate respiratory repertoire rather than simply dividing breaths into “correct” and “incorrect.”

CHAN, P.-Y. S.; LEE, L.-Y.; DAVENPORT, P. W. (2024). Neural mechanisms of respiratory interoception. Autonomic Neuroscience, 253, 103181.
Shows that respiratory perception emerges from the integration of multiple somatic, visceral, and motor signals, helping explain why attention to breathing can increase the differentiation of bodily states.

DIAS, A. L. A. et al.; TORT, A. B. L. (2024/2025). Breathing Modulates Network Activity in Frontal Brain Regions during Anxiety. Journal of Neuroscience, 45(2).
Research involving the Brain Institute at UFRN shows in an animal model that anxiety-like states are associated with respiratory changes and altered coupling between breathing and prefrontal networks, allowing us to connect breathing and defensive states without claiming that emotions are literally stored in tissues.

CRAVO, A. M. et al. (2022). Time experience during social distancing: A longitudinal study during the first months of COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Science Advances, 8(15), eabj7205.
The longitudinal Brazilian study shows that the experience of the passage of time varies with subjective states and lived experience, experimentally reinforcing the distinction between chronological interval and experienced duration.

BUENO, F. D.; NOBRE, A. C.; CRAVO, A. M. (2024). Time for What? Dissociating Explicit Timing Tasks through Electrophysiological Signatures. eNeuro, 11(2).
The UFABC EEG study shows that duration processing contains both shared components and task-dependent ones, offering an experimental bridge for asking whether prioritizing different Body-Territory states also changes perceived time.

BrainLatam (2026). Copa 2026 e Corpo-Território 5D — onde o jogo nasce antes de acontecer.
Presents the material 3D space of the Body-Territory and proposes lived time as derived from the dynamics of representations that gain, lose, or change priority within that space.

BrainLatam (2026). La conciencia es un movimiento que se percibe ser.
Formulates the hypothesis that consciousness involves material movement that gains perception and qualia, connecting metabolism, pre-activation of spaces, and transformation of the Body-Territory.

BrainLatam (2026). Percepção Não É Canal: É Estado.
Develops the idea that a stimulus encounters an organism already configured by breathing, posture, memory, territory, and history, helping frame attention as prioritization of bodily states rather than as the simple opening of a sensory channel.

BrainLatam (2026). El cuerpo necesita espacio para señalar.
Supports the BrainLatam hypothesis that expanding possibilities for movement may expand possibilities for bodily signaling and differentiation, without assuming that emotions are literally stored in muscles or organs.