Fundamental Statistics in Psychology and Education

Summary.-Uninostril breathing facilitates the performance on spatial and verbal cognitive tasks, said to be right and left brain functions, respectively. Since hemispheric memory functions are also known to be lateralized, the present st~~dy assessed the effects of uninostril breathing on the performance in verbal and spatial memory tests. School children (N= 108 whose ages ranged from 10 to 17 years) were randomly assigned to four groups. Each group practiced a speci€ic yoga breathing technique: (i) right nostril breathing, (ii) left nosuil breathing, (iii) alternate nostril breathing, or (iv) breath awareness without manipulation of nostrils. These techniques were practiced for 10 days. Verbal and spatial memory was assessed initially and aher 10 days. An age-matched control group of 27 were similarly assessed. All 4 trained groups showed a significant increase in spatial test scores at retest, bur rhe control group showed no change. Average increase in spatial memory scores for the trained groups was 84%. It appears yoga breathing increases spatial rather than verbal scores, without a lateralized effect The nasal cycle is an ultradian rhythm characterized by alternating patency of the left and right nostrils with a periodicity of 1 to 8 hours (Keuning, 1968). Some reports suggested a connection between the phases of the nasal cycle and the cerebral hemisphere which is dominant, mediated through a neural reflex (Werntz, Bickford, Bloom, & Shannahoff-Khalsa, 1983). This was based on studies using the electroencephalogram (EEG). Forced unilateral nostril breathing modified EEG activity over the two hemispheres, with a greater amplitude on the side contralateral to the patent nostril. This was also bebeved to influence performance on specific tasks (Beubel, 1977; Klein, Pilon, Prossner, & Shannahoff-Khalsa, 1986; Jella & Shannahoff-Khalsa, 1993). In the report by Klein, et al. (1986) adult volunteers tended to exhibit right-nostril dominance during normal breathing, to perform better on simple perceptual tasks with verbal information and known to be carried out by the left hemisphere, compared with subjects whose left nostril was dominant. Sdarly during the left nostril-dominant phase subjects performed better on simple perceptual tasks using spatial information inferred to activate the right hemisphere. Both verbal and spatial tasks involved decidmg whether stimulus pairs were same or different. For the verbal tasks stirnuh were pairs of upper and lower case letters, while for the 'Address correspondence to Shirle Telles, Ph.D., Vivekananda Kendra Yoga Research Foundation, No 19, Ekanath Bhavan, K. &. Nagar, Bangalore 560 019, India.

Yoga Breathing through a Particular Nostril Increases Spatial Memory Scores without Lateralized Effects

Handedness, eyedness and nasal cycle in children with autism.

This study describes the effects of 30 minutes of unilateral forced nostril breathing on cognitive performance in 51 right-handed undergraduate psychology students (25 males and 26 females). A verbal analogies task modeled after the Miller Analogies and SAT Tests was used as a test of left-hemispheric performance and mental rotation tasks based on the Vandenburg and Kuse adaptation of Shepard and Metzler's tests were used as spatial tasks for testing right-hemispheric performance. Spatial task performance was significantly enhanced during left nostril breathing in both males and females, p =. 028. Verbal task performance was greater during right nostril breathing, but not significantly p =. 14. These results are discussed in comparison to other cognitive and physiological studies using unilateral forced nostril breathing. This yogic breathing technique may have useful application in treating psychophysiological disorders with hemispheric imbalances and disorders with autonomic abnormalities.

The Effects of Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing on Cognitive Performance

https://sequencewiz.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Lateralized-rhythms-of-the-central-and-autonomic-nervous-systems.-D.-Shannahoff-Khalsa.pdf

Susan Prosser

Papers

Nasal airflow asymmetries and human performance