Mental imagery is viewed as a fundamental component of human cognition, supporting memory, emotional processing, future simulation, and conscious experience. Although mental imagery vividness has traditionally been attributed to differences in sensory processing, emerging evidence suggests that internally generated images are also shaped by ongoing bodily and interoceptive signals. Here, we...
PLoS OneAugust 27, 2025Amy Kartar, Toru Horinouchi, Balázs Örzsik et al.1 citation
The popularity of breathwork as a therapeutic tool for psychological distress is rapidly expanding. Breathwork practices that increase ventilatory rate or depth, facilitated by music, can evoke subjective experiential states analogous to altered states of consciousness (ASCs) evoked by psychedelic substances. These states include components such as euphoria, bliss, and perceptual differences....
High Ventilation Breathwork (HVB) refers to practices employing specific volitional manipulation of breathing, with a long history of use to relieve various forms of psychological distress. This paper seeks to offer a consolidative insight into potential clinical application of HVB as a treatment of psychiatric disorders. We thus review the characteristic phenomenological and neurophysiological...