Ancient Indian rishis set great store by pranayama. They made the breathing exercises part of daily prayer and religious rituals, though they never claimed that pranayama was anything mystical or metaphysical.
However, people, especially since the colonial era, read mysticism into pranayama because of the apparent disconnect between breathing and claimed outcomes such as a ‘clear mind’.
Now, a group of researchers from Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, have found the connection. The research explains the mechanism by which breathing helps mental activity.
The research had nothing to do with pranayama — in fact, the paper published by the researchers in Nature Communications does not even mention it.
The study focused on seokmun hoheup, the Korean equivalent of pranayama. It looked at practices such as deep breathing and diaphragm displacement and measured their correlation with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) dynamics. (CSF surrounds the brain and spinal cord, supplying nutrients, removing waste and cushioning them from injury.)
The study involved 20 individuals with long-term formal training in seokmun hoheup and 25 others with no formal long-term breathing practice. The researchers looked at CSF movement during regular and deep breathing. They saw that deep breathing enhanced CSF dynamics in both groups, but the trained group had greater CSF movement. Interestingly, even during regular breathing, “trained participants showed higher CSF mean speed, displacement and net flow”.
Inhale length and diaphragm displacement, which correspond to nadi suddhi and kapala bhati practices of pranayama, show the strongest correlations with CSF movement, the paper says.
Tellingly, the researchers say that their findings identify respiration in the awake state as a modifiable, non-invasive mechanism that influences involuntary functions such as CSF dynamics. This, they say, may have implications for CSF-mediated brain haemeostasis — the complex system that maintains a stable internal environment for the brain to function.
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Published on December 15, 2025
