Exhaling may speed up reaction times
Northwestern University researchers stumbled on the effect while recording breathing patterns in a search for sleep apnoea treatments. Volunteers pressed a button the instant a red square on screen changed to yellow, while short nasal tubes tracked each breath. Responses came in roughly 41 milliseconds quicker when people were breathing out or holding their breath than when they were breathing in, and the gap did not depend on how sleepy they were. It is a single small experiment, but it hints that the body's readiness to respond rises and falls with the breath cycle.
For you: Worth knowing if split seconds matter to you: in this test, people reacted faster while breathing out than while breathing in.
What it shows: Reported by Science News and not verified by us: we could not trace this story to a published paper, so treat it as news rather than evidence we have checked.