Scientists have discovered another unique feature by which a person can be identified

Each person’s fingerprint and iris are unique. Now scientists have discovered another feature — the individual style of nasal breathing, which can also serve as a means of identification. About this informs The New York Times.

Most people rarely think about breathing, but for some scientists this constant process may contain important information about the functioning of the brain. With each breath, sensory neurons and other cells that help process data about the environment are activated. Researchers Noam Sobel and Timna Soroka from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel decided to test whether people could be identified by long-term recordings of their breathing.

“We hypothesized that if the brain is unique, so are breathing patterns,” Dr. Sobel explained the idea.

To obtain evidence of the uniqueness of breathing, Dark Magpie created a sensor that captures the flow of air from each nostril of a person. The device was attached to the upper body of the volunteers for 24 hours. Thanks to special software that analyzed the data from the sensors, the authors managed to recognize people by breathing in 90% of cases during the experiment.

One person may have a longer pause before each breath, while others may have a shorter or no pause. In addition, many people have more air in one nostril than the other during certain parts of the day. The researchers found that the more data they received, the more accurately the software recognized the participants. They called the unique type of inhalation and exhalation cycles “breath print”.

Two years after the first stage of the study, scientists re-examined the breathing of some volunteers and found that the individual characteristics of their breathing remained unchanged. The software continued to successfully identify people by their breath.

In addition, the scientists found a connection between breathing characteristics and the results of participants’ surveys regarding anxiety, depression and autism. For example, people with higher levels of depressive symptoms were more likely to exhibit a tendency to exhale very quickly. According to the researchers, monitoring this unconscious process can help in a deeper understanding of mental states and disorders.

Neuroscientist Jack Feldman, who was not involved in the study, said it “provides very strong evidence that we have distinctive patterns of breathing.” According to him, the uniqueness of breathing is logical, since this process is connected with many physiological systems, each of which has its own individual characteristics.

The authors of the study plan to continue their work to find out whether it is possible to define a healthy type of breathing that will serve as a basis for disease monitoring. Also, in the future, they want to answer the question of whether the cycles of inhalation and exhalation can affect the state of the human body, although for this they need to collect more data.