Andrew Huberman· PhD
So there are basically two areas of the brain that control breathing. The first is called the pre-Botzinger complex. You don't have to worry about the name so much. Just know that it was named after a bottle of wine and that it was discovered by the great Jack Feldman, who's a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. This is one of the most fundamental discoveries in all of neuroscience in the last hundred years or more because this brain area that Jack and his colleagues discovered controls all aspects of breathing that are rhythmic, that is, when inhales follow exhales follow inhales follow exhales. That's all controlled by a small set of neurons in this brainstem area, so around the region of the neck, called the pre-Botzinger complex.