Unilateral nostril breathing influences lateralized cognitive performance

Deep Breathing Practice Facilitates Retention of Newly Learned Motor Skills

“…Block et al 19. showed that unilateral nostril breathing led to better performance on both spatial and verbal tasks, a result subsequently corroborated by other studies420.…”

Gamma oscillations in the rat ventral striatum originate in the piriform cortex

“…Given the much larger distance from the human vStr to piriform cortex, and the widespread use of relatively local referencing in depth electrode recordings, it seems a priori unlikely that gamma oscillations in the human vStr are volume conducted from piriform cortex. More generally, however, there is at least some evidence that lateralized nasal breathing affects both the EEG signal and various aspects of cognitive performance (Block et al, 1989; Zelano et al, 2016); intracranial EEG recordings in epilepsy patients show a connection between nasal breathing and increases in power of human delta (0.5-4 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz), and beta (13-34 Hz) oscillations in the piriform, amygdala and hippocampus. Although gamma activity has been linked to respiration in the olfactory circuit in rodents (Gault and Leaton, 1963), the time course of vStr gamma power rules out respiration as the only factor controlling gamma oscillations in the vStr LFP.…”

Sex differences in phonological coding: Alphabet transformation speed

“…Some of these differences are quite large. For example, nine out of ten women outperform the average man in ability to discriminate basic language sounds (Block, Arnott, Quigley, & Lynch, 1989). Nine out of ten women make fewer pauses in utterances than the average man (Hall, 1984).…”