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Citation

Monti A, Porciello G, Tieri G, Aglioti SM. The "embreathment" illusion highlights the role of breathing in corporeal awareness. J Neurophysiol. 2020 Jan 1;123(1):420-427. doi: 10.1152/jn.00617.2019. Epub 2019 Dec 4. PMID: 31800367; PMCID: PMC6985859.

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Note: You can share anything you want from these 411s—the more sharing the better. But this is my attempt to condense the findings into a bite-sized wisdom nugget:

By mapping peoples’ real breathing rate and amplitude onto virtual avatars, this study found that—even without conscious awareness—breathing is essential to our feeling of body ownership and, most significantly, to our sense of body agency.

4 Fundamentals

1. Essential Background Material

Corporeal awareness is a form of self-consciousness. It refers to being aware that you own a body, that you control that body, and that that body occupies a position in space.
The factors determining this “sense of embodiment” are diverse (and likely different from person to person). But breathing seems like a potentially significant factor in corporeal awareness because it is intimately tied to our physiology, brains, and emotions.
Moreover, because breathing is both automatic and under voluntary control, it may be especially vital to our sense of embodiment and feeling of body agency.
This study assessed how much breathing contributes to corporeal awareness through a unique virtual reality experiment.

2. What Did this Research Do?

Watch a YouTube Clip of the Experiment Here

They brought 32 male volunteers into a lab, had them put on an immersive virtual reality headset and breathing monitor, and then ran them through several experiments. Note that they did not know the research was about breathing.

They called their virtual reality setup the “embreathment" illusion.

What is the “Embreathment” Illusion?

The “embreathment” illusion refers to the real-time mapping of a person’s breathing rhythm and amplitude onto a virtual avatar. (It’s also one of the best words I’ve seen in a science paper.)

Embreathment Illusion Experiments

Each participant went through eight different conditions ranging from “most congruent” to “least congruent”:

Most Congruent: A human-like avatar breathed at the same rate and amplitude as the person and was viewed from the first-person perspective.
Least Congruent: A wooden avatar, viewed from the third-person, breathed out-of-phase with the person. For instance, the avatar inhaled when the person exhaled.

The other six conditions were in between these extremes. Participants experienced each situation for two minutes.

Assessments

Before the virtual reality experiments, participants answered the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) questionnaire to assess interoceptive awareness.

After each two-minute virtual reality segment, participants answered a five-question survey assessing how much they felt that: (1) the virtual body was theirs (ownership), (2), they controlled the movements of the virtual body (agency), and (3) they were in the same place as the virtual body (location).

Then, after the experiments were over, they performed two more tests to assess interoception:

Heartbeat Counting Task: They were asked to count their heartbeats over a specified time interval.
“Pneumoception” Task: They listened to 26 breathing soundtracks and had to label whether they were their own or not (how amazing is this?!)

3. What Were the Major Findings?

For these results, keep in mind that the participants had no clue that breathing was being modified. They were just looking in the goggles and answering the questions.

The participants felt like the virtual body was more their own when the avatar breathed in phase with their actual breathing.
They also felt more body agency—that they were in control of the avatar’s body movements—when its breathing matched their own. In fact, breathing was more important than body perspective and visual appearance for having a sense of agency. To put this in perspective, this means switching from a human avatar to a wooden block avatar was less important than breathing in phase or out of phase. Pretty crazy.
The participants’ actual breathing changed based on how in phase it was with the avatar’s breathing. For example, the amplitude of each breath increased slightly when in phase with the avatar and decreased slightly when out of phase with the avatar.
These impacts depended on how interoceptive each person was—the more interoceptive they were, the less susceptible they were to the experimental manipulations. (Note: recall that interoception was measured by the heartbeat counting and pneumoception tests.)

4. Why Do These Results Matter?

This study shows that breathing is a fundamental physiological variable providing a sense of embodiment. It suggests that breathing may play a key role in our feelings of self-consciousness 🤯.

Critically, these results show that breathing increased body agency. Meaning when they saw the avatar’s breathing move with their breathing (even though it wasn’t conscious awareness), it gave them a sense of control over the avatar’s actions.

I believe these results help explain why conscious breathing exercises also increase self-agency in our real bodies. Anecdotally, almost everyone who practices breathing feels a greater sense of body agency.

Here, we learn why. If breathing increases our sense of agency even without conscious awareness, it just makes sense that deliberately controlling your breathing would provide an even greater sense of agency.

Finally, these results are significant because they highlight the role of interoception with breathing and embodiment. Participants who scored higher on the interoceptive tasks were less likely to be influenced by the different scenarios. This suggests that more interoception may lead to higher levels of corporeal awareness and, thus, less susceptibility to bodily illusions.

I believe these results are especially significant because breath practices build interoception, simply because you become aware of your breathing and body. So, the more you practice, the more interoception you’ll develop, and thus the greater your sense of corporeal awareness will be. Stated simply, you will know yourself and be less susceptible to outside influences. But this is just my speculation.

1 Big Takeaway

Even without conscious awareness, breathing is essential to your feeling of body ownership and, most significantly, to your sense of body agency.

1 Practical Application

Breath Awareness + Breath Practices

Because this study found that breathing uniquely contributes to our feeling of body ownership and agency, practicing breath awareness may increase these aspects of corporeal awareness and interoception, reducing your susceptibility to bodily illusions.

An easy practice you can do anytime is to stop and notice where you feel the sensations of breathing in your body, in whatever body position you are currently occupying. It’s that simple.

Moreover, my subjective interpretation of these results suggests that voluntary control of breathing may increase our sense of agency even more. Thus, regularly taking time to perform any breathing practice you enjoy could increase your sense of self-agency, which may have positive ripple effects on all aspects of your health and well-being.