I don't think it is.

Um, so, um, in post-Renaissance science, one of the goals was to try and identify what the French called the noeud vital, the node of life.

And the node of life was the source of breathing because every living vertebrate mammal, the way you tell whether they're alive or not is whether they're breathing.

And if you go back to Greek, anima means to breathe.

So we have animals, animation.

These are all about things having to do with life, but the root is breathing.

So we've al-always had a sense that breathing was important.

Mm-hmm.

Hoo.

Or when you begin to, uh, exercise and you have to go (panting).... and actually move that air out.

This group of cells, which is silent at rest, suddenly becomes active to drive those muscles and it appears that it's an independent oscillator in a region around the facial nucleus.

When this region was initially identified, it, we thought it was involved in sensing carbon dioxide.

It was what we call a central chemoreceptor.

That is, we wanna keep carbon dioxide levels, particularly in the brain, at a relatively stable level 'cause the brain is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in pH.

If there's a big shift in s- carbon dioxide, they'll be a sh- big shift in brain pH and that'll throw your brain, if I can use the technical term, out of whack.

What are some of the other features of our brain and body, be it blinking or eye movements, or, um, ability to encode sounds, or any features of the way that we function and move and perceive things that are coordinated with breathing in some interesting way?