When Breathing Changes the Brain and the Experience of Self

CO₂, EEG, NIRS, the DMN, and what happens when the Body-Territory perceives the movement it is producing

In the previous blogs, we gradually moved deeper into a single breath.

We followed air.

We divided the respiratory cycle.

We encountered CO₂.

We reached the kidneys.

Now we need to return to a larger question:

what happens to what we call “self” when breathing changes profoundly?

Because breathing can change:

CO₂,

pH,

cerebral blood flow,

heart dynamics,

electrical brain activity,

interoception,

muscle tension,

attention,

and what the organism is able to perceive happening within itself.

During intense breathwork practices, some people also report changes in body boundaries, spatial perception, self-reference, unity, or the distinction between “me” and the surrounding world.

But we need to begin with a scientific boundary:

a change in conscious experience does not automatically reveal the neural or physiological mechanism that produced it.

Consciousness as a Movement That Perceives Itself Being

Within BrainLatam’s 5D Consciousness framework, we have been using a synthesis:

consciousness is a movement that perceives itself being within the metabolism produced.

But here we need to clarify what we mean by metabolism.

In conventional biochemistry, metabolism refers primarily to the network of chemical reactions through which organisms transform matter and energy.

In the BrainLatam conceptual framework, we use produced metabolism in a broader integrative sense to describe the material movement continuously generated within a living Body-Territory.

This may include:

chemical reactions,

ATP consumption,

metabolic products,

ionic gradients,

electrical activity,

blood flow,

oxygenation,

CO₂,

pressure changes,

muscle tension,

visceral movements,

posture,

respiratory movement.

We are not proposing a replacement for the biochemical definition of metabolism.

We are asking the reader to recognize that conscious experience occurs within a material organism that never stops moving.

Brazilian researcher Alfredo Pereira Jr., through Triple-Aspect Monism and his more recent proposal of Qualiomics, argues that material processes, informational organization, and sentient experience cannot simply be collapsed into one another when we attempt to understand consciousness. He also emphasizes the epistemic importance of first-person qualia. (Acad Pub)

Antonio and Hanna Damasio, from another theoretical route, argue that homeostatic feelings continuously inform the organism about the state of its own living body and are central to the biology of consciousness. (PubMed)

Pereira, Damasio, and BrainLatam are not making the same claim.

But they allow us to ask:

how much of the experience of being depends on perceiving the material changes of the organism that is being?

Breathing Changes That Material Movement

Breathe normally.

Now imagine progressively increasing the depth and rate of every breath.

Respiratory muscles move more.

Alveolar ventilation may rise.

CO₂ may fall.

pH may rise.

Cerebral blood vessels may constrict.

Cerebral blood flow may decrease.

Cardiovascular dynamics change.

Muscles and viscera receive different mechanical and chemical signals.

And the organism continues to generate representations of those changes.

A breathing technique therefore does not act on an abstract “mind.”

It first changes a material Body-Territory.

And the organism that has been changed is also the organism that will continue to perceive.

Circular and Holotropic Breathing: When CO₂ Changes Dramatically

Practices such as Holotropic Breathwork, Conscious Connected Breathing, and other forms of high-ventilation breathwork often involve continuous cyclic breathing with increased rate and/or depth and little or no pause between inhalation and exhalation.

A 2025 study investigated circular breathwork while measuring end-tidal CO₂.

Participants performing active breathwork developed substantial reductions in ETCO₂, and lower CO₂ levels were associated with greater intensity of altered-state experiences. (Nature)

This is important.

The finding does not mean:

low CO₂ = mystical experience.

The relationship was not absolute.

Expectation, music, attention, social setting, previous experience, and other physiological processes may also contribute.

But we cannot discuss intense breathwork while pretending that CO₂ remained unchanged.

When CO₂ Falls, Cerebral Blood Flow Falls

Here the direction must be explicit.

If intense breathing excessively increases alveolar ventilation:

alveolar ventilation ↑
→ PaCO₂/ETCO₂ ↓
→ pH tends to rise
→ cerebral vasoconstriction
→ cerebrovascular resistance ↑
→ cerebral blood flow ↓.

The opposite direction is also important:

CO₂ rises relatively
→ pH tends to fall
→ cerebral vasodilation is favored
→ cerebrovascular resistance decreases
→ cerebral blood flow tends to rise.

So when a person enters an unusual subjective state during hyperventilation, we need to know whether the brain is also undergoing substantial changes in perfusion.

That question became especially important in recent high-ventilation breathwork studies.

In 2026, Cerebral Blood Flow Fell by Almost Half

A study published in 2026 examined experienced practitioners during high-ventilation breathwork using arterial spin labeling and resting-state fMRI.

At peak breathwork, global gray-matter cerebral blood flow decreased by an average of 45.5%. (PubMed)

That is a major physiological change.

But another result may be even more important.

The intensity of the subjective altered state was not simply proportional to the magnitude of the global reduction in cerebral blood flow.

In other words:

less cerebral blood flow did not automatically mean a stronger subjective experience.

The organism changed dramatically.

But conscious experience could not be reduced to one hemodynamic variable.

And the DMN Did Not Simply “Switch Off”

The Default Mode Network, or DMN, is frequently discussed in relation to:

self-referential thinking,

autobiographical memory,

internal narratives,

future simulation,

and representations related to the self.

Because psychedelic research has often reported changes in DMN organization during experiences of ego dissolution, a popular simplification has emerged:

“altered states happen because the DMN switches off.”

But the 2026 high-ventilation breathwork study does not support that simple conclusion.

At the group level, there was no significant overall reduction in DMN functional connectivity during breathwork. (PubMed)

Exploratory analyses found that individuals with greater reductions in some measures of DMN connectivity could report stronger altered-state experiences.

However, those associations depended on analytical choices and were not robust across all processing approaches.

Therefore:

breathwork does not simply “turn off the DMN.”

And:

the DMN is not an on/off switch for the self.

EEG Gives Us Another Window

EEG measures electrical potential differences generated by coordinated neural activity.

It offers temporal resolution in milliseconds.

This makes it particularly interesting for respiratory studies because the breathing cycle itself unfolds as a continuous temporal structure.

A 2024 study of Conscious Connected Breathing in 20 healthy participants reported changes in several EEG frequency bands after breathwork, including decreases in delta, theta, and some beta components, as well as increased gamma power in experienced practitioners. Participants also reported changes in mood and non-ordinary states of consciousness. (Springer)

These findings are intriguing.

But again:

EEG changed

does not mean:

consciousness expanded.

EEG provides one third-person measurement of the organism.

The experience still needs to be described in first person.

Breathing Already Organizes Brain Activity Before Breathwork Becomes Intense

We do not need extreme respiratory practices to observe breathing-brain coupling.

Brazilian neuroscientist Adriano Tort, from the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, and colleagues reviewed in 2025 evidence that breathing can coordinate neural activity across multiple brain areas, organizational levels, and behavioral states. (Nature)

The breathing cycle is therefore not simply a mechanical pump operating beneath cognition.

It can provide temporal organization to neural activity.

This becomes particularly interesting during nasal breathing, because airflow through the nasal cavity provides sensory input that can participate in respiration-related brain rhythms.

But we should again avoid converting an association into a metaphysical conclusion.

Nasal breathing is not consciousness.

It is one of the bodily rhythms through which neural activity can become temporally organized.

What Would NIRS See?

Now imagine observing intense breathwork with NIRS.

The system sends near-infrared light into tissue and estimates changes in:

HbO — oxygenated hemoglobin

and

HbR — deoxygenated hemoglobin.

The person begins high-ventilation breathing.

HbO changes.

A tempting interpretation would be:

“the brain activated because consciousness changed.”

But that conclusion could be completely misleading.

If intense breathing increased alveolar ventilation and CO₂ fell:

alveolar ventilation ↑
→ CO₂ ↓
→ pH ↑
→ cerebral vasoconstriction
→ cerebral blood flow ↓
→ HbO/HbR may change.

Therefore, NIRS is not observing only what neurons are doing.

It records hemodynamics that can also be profoundly altered by ventilation, CO₂, blood pressure, extracerebral circulation, and systemic vascular dynamics.

This is why NIRS without respiratory gases would give us only part of the story.

In our future experiment:

NIRS without CO₂ is an incomplete description of the breathing brain.

The Self May Be More Bodily Than It Appears

Chilean researcher Diego Candia-Rivera and colleagues proposed in 2024 a network-physiology approach to bodily self-awareness.

Instead of locating the bodily self in a single brain region, they emphasize continuous interactions among brain activity, cardiac signals, visceral signals, and interoceptive processes. (PubMed)

This helps us move away from the idea that somewhere in the cortex there is a single center producing:

“I.”

Chilean scientist Camilo Miguel Signorelli, together with Argentine researcher Enzo Tagliazucchi and collaborators, has similarly argued for studying consciousness through dynamic multilayer brain-body interactions rather than through a single neural signature. (PubMed)

This creates a powerful question for BrainLatam:

if we significantly change the material movements through which an organism continuously represents itself, can the perceived boundaries of the self also change?

The 3D Body-Territory Changes Before the Person Explains What Happened

Within 5D Consciousness, the 3D dimension is the actual material space of the Body-Territory.

It is not a symbolic mental map floating inside the brain.

During intense breathing, this 3D material space may undergo changes in:

CO₂,

pH,

blood flow,

oxygen distribution,

heart intervals,

ionic gradients,

muscle contraction,

thoracoabdominal movement,

temperature,

pressure,

metabolic demand,

electrical brain activity.

Some of these processes may remain below perception.

Others may acquire qualia.

And when some of them acquire qualia, the organism gains a changed experience of its own ongoing state.

This is where our formulation becomes useful:

consciousness is a movement that perceives itself being within the metabolism produced.

Again, this is a BrainLatam working hypothesis, not an established definition of consciousness.

We are proposing that conscious experience does not exist as a detached observer looking at bodily metabolism from outside.

It occurs within the same material Body-Territory that is producing the changes being perceived.

Jiwasa Is Not a Brain Network

This is where Jiwasa begins to enter the series more explicitly.

In Aymara, jiwasa can be understood as an inclusive “we” — a relational first person that includes both speaker and listener. A recent Library of Congress Sentirpensar guide uses the term precisely in this relational sense. (Library of Congress Guides)

But we should not write:

Jiwasa = reduced DMN connectivity.

Nor:

Jiwasa = ego dissolution.

Nor:

Jiwasa = synchronization between brains.

That would turn a situated Andean linguistic and relational concept into a Western biomarker.

Instead, Jiwasa enters here as a phenomenological question:

when the usual boundary of “I” loses some of its priority, what begins to be experienced as part of the lived field?

Another person?

Music?

Breathing?

A group?

The room?

A landscape?

The territory?

Perhaps none of them.

We cannot answer before asking the person who lived the experience.

First-Person Experience Must Enter the Experiment

Imagine two participants.

Both show:

ETCO₂ falling from 40 to 22 mmHg.

Both show large changes in cerebral perfusion.

Both present changes in EEG.

One reports:

“I disappeared.”

The other reports:

“I became intensely aware of my body.”

Their physiology may overlap.

Their qualia do not need to.

This is precisely why the future experiment cannot contain only:

EEG + NIRS + ECG + respiration.

It also needs:

first-person reports.

We want to know not only:

what moved?

but:

what part of that movement became perceived as being?

Breathing Does Not Reveal One Mechanism of Consciousness

This series is therefore moving away from simple statements.

We will not say:

long exhalation activates the vagus.

We will not say:

breathwork switches off the DMN.

We will not say:

low CO₂ produces mystical experience.

We will not say:

one EEG frequency represents expanded consciousness.

Instead, we can observe something more interesting.

Breathing can simultaneously change:

**CO₂

• pH

• cerebral perfusion

• cardiovascular dynamics

• EEG

• NIRS

• interoception

• bodily representation

• subjective experience.**

And perhaps consciousness becomes scientifically more interesting when we stop asking which one of these signals is consciousness.

Jiwasa suggests another possibility:

what if we allow the signals to speak together without forcing one of them to become the owner of the experience?

A Movement That Perceives Itself Being

Return now to a single breath.

The diaphragm moves.

Pressure changes.

Air enters.

Molecules redistribute.

ATP is consumed.

Ions cross membranes.

Blood moves.

The heart changes interval.

Neural populations change their activity.

Most of this does not reach conscious perception.

But something does.

Perhaps pressure.

Perhaps temperature.

Perhaps the heartbeat.

Perhaps the sensation of expansion.

Perhaps the feeling:

“I am here.”

In the BrainLatam hypothesis, consciousness may not require a separate spectator observing those processes.

It may emerge when part of the material movement produced by the Body-Territory becomes capable of being perceived as its own ongoing state.

And if breathing profoundly changes that movement, perhaps it can temporarily change the way the organism experiences the boundary of what it calls:

self.

This does not mean that the self disappears.

It means that its representation may be more dynamic than the word “I” makes us believe.

The next experimental question becomes:

when breathing changes the material Body-Territory, which physiological movements change first, which reach qualia, and which participate in changing the experience of being a self among others?

Perhaps this is where Jiwasa begins.

Not as a neural network.

But as a question that a living Body-Territory can ask:

when “I” changes, what becomes “we”?

Main References

PEREIRA JR., A. (2023/2024). Qualiomics: The Metaphysics of Consciousness. Forum for Philosophical Studies, 1(1), 489.
Brazilian researcher Alfredo Pereira Jr. develops Qualiomics from Triple-Aspect Monism and argues for the irreducible importance of first-person qualitative experience when studying consciousness. (Acad Pub)

DAMASIO, A.; DAMASIO, H. (2022). Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness. Brain, 145(7), 2231–2235.
Connects consciousness to continuous bodily regulation and homeostatic feelings, supporting the idea that the experience of being is deeply related to information about the state of the living organism. (PubMed)

SIGNORELLI, C. M.; DÍAZ BOILS, J.; TAGLIAZUCCHI, E.; JARRAYA, B.; DECO, G. (2022). From brain-body function to conscious interactions. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 141, 104833.
With Latin American researchers Camilo Miguel Signorelli and Enzo Tagliazucchi, proposes a multilayer brain-body framework for studying conscious experience rather than reducing consciousness to one isolated neural signal. (PubMed)

CANDIA-RIVERA, D.; ENGELEN, T.; BABO-REBELO, M.; SALAMONE, P. C. (2024). Interoception, network physiology and the emergence of bodily self-awareness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 165, 105864.
Chilean researcher Diego Candia-Rivera integrates interoception and network physiology to explain bodily self-awareness through dynamic brain-body interactions. (PubMed)

TORT, A. B. L.; LAPLAGNE, D. A.; DRAGUHN, A.; GONZALEZ, J. (2025). Global coordination of brain activity by the breathing cycle. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 26, 333–353.
Led by Brazilian neuroscientist Adriano Tort, reviews evidence that respiration coordinates neural activity across widespread brain regions and multiple states. (Nature)

HAVENITH, M. N. et al. (2025). Decreased CO₂ saturation during circular breathwork supports emergence of altered states of consciousness. Communications Psychology, 3, 59.
Shows that circular high-ventilation breathwork can produce substantial reductions in ETCO₂ and that greater CO₂ reductions are associated with more intense altered-state experiences, without establishing CO₂ as the sole cause. (Nature)

KARTAR, A. A. et al. (2025). Neurobiological substrates of altered states of consciousness induced by high ventilation breathwork accompanied by music. PLOS ONE, 20(8), e0329411.
Shows that high-ventilation breathwork can produce altered subjective states alongside strong cardiovascular and cerebral perfusion changes, reinforcing the need to study experience and systemic physiology together. (PLOS)

SCHMITZ, C. N. et al. (2026). How high ventilation breathwork alters consciousness: Hypoperfusion, network dynamics, and subjective experience. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry, 149, 111873.
Reports an average 45.5% reduction in global gray-matter cerebral blood flow during high-ventilation breathwork and no significant group-level decrease in DMN connectivity, directly challenging the claim that breathwork simply “switches off the DMN.” (PubMed)

BAHI, C. et al. (2024). Effects of conscious connected breathing on cortical brain activity, mood and state of consciousness in healthy adults. Current Psychology, 43, 10578–10589.
A small EEG study showing changes in cortical spectral activity and subjective state after connected breathing, offering preliminary evidence without allowing specific EEG bands to be equated with particular states of consciousness. (Springer)

Library of Congress – Sentirpensar: Mapping Latin American Perspectives (2025). Language.
Describes jiwasa as an inclusive Aymara “we” that includes speaker and listener, supporting its use here as a relational and phenomenological question rather than as a neural construct. (Library of Congress Guides)

BrainLatam (2026). 5D Consciousness / Body-Territory.
Provides the conceptual basis for understanding the 3D Body-Territory as a real material space in which molecules, metabolism, gradients, flows, tensions, and movements continuously change, while only part of those changes acquire qualia.

BrainLatam (2026). Consciousness Is a Movement That Perceives Itself Being.
Formulates the BrainLatam hypothesis that consciousness occurs when part of the material movement generated within the living Body-Territory becomes perceptible as its own ongoing state.