The Neuroscience of Conscious Breathing | Dr. Martha Havenith

Описание: Can you alter your state of consciousness using nothing but your breath? According to practitioners across the globe, the answer is yes. In recent years, some effects of conscious breathing have become widely known, e.g. the ‘mental stillness’ one may access through slow-breath meditation. But conscious breathing can also facilitate more dramatic shifts. It may heighten your senses, resurface childhood memories, conjure up visual experiences, or reveal deep-seated behavioural patterns.

The insight that you can literally ‘change your mind’ through breathing is both very old and very new: Indian, Tibetan, Native American and other cultures have all developed breathing practices to alter your state of mind – often millennia ago. Yet such techniques have only been brought (back) to Western cultures in the 1970s; and the underlying mechanisms have barely begun to be studied by neuroscience.

In this webinar, we will discuss current insights into the neuronal mechanisms by which breathing – conscious and unconscious – can alter cognitive processing. We will focus on the cortical effects of three popular and complementary breathing practices: Slow-breath meditation; the Wim-Hof Method; and Holotropic or Connective Breathwork (also referred to as Rebirthing).

ABOUT MARTHA HAVENITH

Martha Havenith, Ph.D. is a research group leader at the Ernst-Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience, where she uses Virtual Reality tasks to study the brain’s ability to constantly and dynamically juggle multiple bits of information within the same group of neurons. She is also a trained coach for Connective Breathwork, and regularly facilitates breathwork sessions for individuals and small groups.

More about Martha Havenith: https://www.esi-frankfurt.de/people/m...
Ernst-Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience page: https://www.esi-frankfurt.de/