The Science of Breathing – The Academy Podcast with Dr. Jack Feldman

But before we do, let's talk a little bit about, uh, the Pre-Botzinger Complex, what it is, what's the science like.

What is it that we're talking about that is, is arguably the most important neuroscience respiration finding in the history of the world? And that sounds like it's hyperbolic.

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.

And so in the late seventeen hundreds, in an effort to find out where it was, some French neuroscientists did some experiments, and they...

Very crude experiments, sophisticated for the time, but now we would look at them as rather crude.

And they basically removed parts of the nervous system and found out that when they removed parts of the brain stem, that's the region of the nervous system sort of in the back of the neck here.

Um, when they, uh, did damage to the cortex, animals still breathe.

They mostly did studies in rabbits.

They still breathe.

But when they got down to the brain stem and started to interfere with that, they, the animals stopped breathing.

So the, the notion that the, this noeud vital was in the brain stem has been around since the late part of the eighteenth century.

But for the longest time, no one was able to figure out where exactly was it.

And then with the development of more sophisticated techniques and, uh, certainly after World War II, we were able, we, the, uh, neuroscientific and physiological community, was able to try and go after this problem in a little bit more detail.

And when I became interested in this, the idea was that there was a particular region in the brain stem that was generating the rhythm.

And it was based on a, um- An experiment where there was a, a region where if you put a recording device and electrode in, you saw that there was neural activity that was coordinated with the breathing of the animal.

And so this looked like it could be producing that nervous system output.

Remember, the way we breathe is that the nervous system generates a signal.

That signal leaves the nervous system, uh, in the spinal cord.

Let's say it, it goes to the diaphragm.