Welcome to this month's edition of Cool Facts.

A listener suggested this first fact.

Neuroscientists in Munich found that breathing coordinates neuronal activity throughout your

brain when you're sleeping and when you're resting.

Until now, we always thought it was a sense of smell thing, that it was the receptors inside

your nose, and that that was what was in training your brain regions, and we were totally wrong.

So if someone tells you the science is settled, well, apparently you can smell that it's not

settled, or at least your brain knows, because these scientists did large-scale electro-physiological

recordings in mice from thousands of neurons across the limbic system.

I don't actually know how you do that to a mouse, and I'm impressed that they did.

But they looked at the hippocampus, the medial prefrontal and visual cortex, the thalamus,

amygdala, and nucleus acumbens.

And what they found is that breathing is linked directly to your limbic circuits.

This is your fight or flight response.

And that means that your behavioral and emotional responses are tied directly to your brain.

So no, it's not about air flowing over your nasal passages.

It's not about what you smelled.

It's about the breathing rhythm itself, because that's controlling your behavior and your

emotion.

Now, neuroscientists in Munich have figured this out, or you could have just asked your

yoga teacher in the first place.

One of the best things you can do to improve high-field is to get at least six and a half

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