Because breathing through your nose helps you remember better

If we breathe through the nose rather than the mouth, after trying to learn a series of smells, we remember them better.

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Breathing through the nose favors the storage of memories and improves our memory

If there is one way to hold onto your memories, it is to breathe deeply through your nose. Unlike the mouth, in fact, the "way of the nostrils" would be the most effective way to consolidate our memory.

This is stated by some Swedish neuroscientists from the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, who have collaborated with Dutch colleagues from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior in Nijmegen.

They started from an assumption: memory and breathing are intimately linked and, basing their investigation on previous research, which had highlighted a close correlation between breathing and cognitive functions, they come to the conclusion for the first time that if we breathe through the nose rather than the mouth, after trying to learn a series of smells, we remember them better.

"Our study shows that we remember smells better if we breathe through the nose when memory is consolidated, in a process that occurs between learning and memory retrieval," says Artin Arshamian, researcher at the Karolinska Department of Clinical Neuroscience. Institutet.

For the new study, the researchers asked participants to learn twelve different smells and then breathe through their nose or mouth for an hour straight. At the end, they were presented with the old and a new set of twelve other smells, asking them to recognize which ones were already present in the first session.

The results showed that when participants breathed through their nose between the time of learning and recognition, they remembered smells better.

The reason would be explained in the inhalation and exhalation phases, when different parts of the brain are activated, although it is still unknown how this affects all brain activity.

“The idea that breathing affects our behavior is not new. Just think of meditation. The next step is to measure what really happens in the brain and how this is related to memory, ”Arshamian concludes.

The next step will be to measure what actually happens in the brain during breathing and how this is related to memory.