Slow breathing practice in mice reduced fear response comparably to major amygdala manipulation.

“According to Michael, the degree to which they showed less freezing was as much as if there was a major manipulation in the amygdala, which is a part of the brain that's important in fear processing.”

“So, we could do that for, we did that 30 minutes a day for four weeks, okay? Like a breath practice.”

“So recently we had a major breakthrough. We found a protocol by which we can get awake mice to breathe slowly. In other words, whatever their normal breath is, we could slow it down by a factor of 10 and they're fine doing that. We did that 30 minutes a day for four weeks. Okay? Like a breath practice. And we had control animals where we did everything the same except the manipulation we made did not slow down their breathing. We then put them to a standard fear conditioning which we did with my colleague Michael Fanelo who's one of the real gurus of fear. We measured a standard test that put mice in a condition where they're concerned that receive a shock and the response is that they freeze. And the measure of how fearful they are is how long they freeze. The control mice had a freezing time which was just the same as ordinary mice would have. The ones that went through our protocol froze much much less. The degree to which they showed less freezing was as much as if there was a major manipulation in the amygdala, which is a part of the brain that's important in fear processing.”