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More than a rhythm of life: breathing as a binder of orofacial sensation

Nature Neuroscience volume 17, pages 647–651 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

When rodents engage in the exploration of novel stimuli, breathing occurs at an accelerated rate that is synchronous with whisking. We review the recently observed relationships between breathing and the sensations of smell and vibrissa-based touch. We consider the hypothesis that the breathing rhythm serves not only as a motor drive signal, but also as a common clock that binds these two senses into a common percept. This possibility may be extended to include taste through the coordination of licking with breathing. Here we evaluate the status of experimental evidence that pertains to this hypothesis.

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Figure 1: Brainstem circuits generate and coordinate orofacial actions and encode non-olfactory orofacial stimuli.
Figure 2: Smell is coded by projection neurons in the olfactory bulb whose spike rate is phase-locked to the breathing cycle.
Figure 3: Vibrissa touch during exploratory whisking is coded by neurons in layer 4 and 5a of primary vibrissa cortex.
Figure 4: Coordination of sniffing and whisking and the potential functional and potential anatomical basis for binding of synchronous events.

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Acknowledgements

This Perspective is dedicated to the late John C. Curtis. We thank W. Denk, B. Friedman, J.S. Isaacson, S. Jacobson, H.J. Karten, T. Komiyama, D. Rinberg and K. Svoboda for discussions, and K. Miura, D. Rinberg and N. Uchida for supplying data sets. This perspective was conceived at a 2013 Janelia Farms Research Center meeting and the subsequent work was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH085499), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NS058668 and NS077986), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (grant MT-5877), and the US-Israeli Binational Foundation (2011432).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

    David Kleinfeld & Jeffrey D Moore

  2. Section of Neurobiology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

    David Kleinfeld

  3. Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Centre de Recherche Université Laval Robert-Giffard, Québec City, Québec, Canada

    Martin Deschênes

  4. Department of Neurobiology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA

    Fan Wang

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Correspondence to David Kleinfeld.

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Kleinfeld, D., Deschênes, M., Wang, F. et al. More than a rhythm of life: breathing as a binder of orofacial sensation. Nat Neurosci 17, 647–651 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3693

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