Delayed feedback applied to breathing in humans

We studied the response of healthy volunteers to the delayed feedback generated from the breathing signals. Namely, in the freely-breathing volunteers the breathing signal was recorded, delayed by τ seconds and fed back to the same volunteer in real time in the form of a visual and auditory stimulus of low intensity, i.e. the stimulus was crucially non-intrusive. In each case volunteers were instructed to breathe in the way which was most comfortable for them, and no explanation about the kind of applied stimulus was provided to them. Each volunteer experienced 10 different delay times ranging between 10% and 100% of the average breathing period without external stimulus. It was observed that in a significant proportion of subjects (11 out of 24) breathing was slowed down in the presence of delayed feedback with moderate delay. Also, in 6 objects out of 24 the delayed feedback was able to induce transition from nearly periodic to irregular breathing. These observations are consistent with the phenomena observed in numerical simulation of the models of periodic and chaotic self-oscillations with delays, and also in experiments with simpler self-oscillating systems.