At the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, a team of researchers set out to explore a surprisingly uncharted territory — the human breath. They weren’t studying it as doctors usually do, searching for signs of disease. Nor were they measuring athletic performance or lung capacity. What they wanted to know was something deeper and rather unorthodox: whether the rhythm of a person’s breath was as distinctive as their voice or as revealing as their fingerprints.
The answer, it turns out, is yes.
A Signature in the Air
Researchers led by neuroscientist Noam Sobel and doctoral student Timna Soroka demonstrated that people have unique “nasal respiratory fingerprints.” By tracking the way air flows through the nose over a 24-hour period, they identified individuals with an astounding 96.8% accuracy. Even after months — sometimes nearly two years — the signature held.
“You would think that breathing has been measured and analyzed in every way,” said Sobel. “Yet we stumbled upon a completely new way to look at respiration. We consider this as a brain readout.”
Their approach relied on a custom-made, lightweight device worn on the nape of the neck. It gently trailed tubes beneath each nostril, continuously recording the flow of air in and out. Unlike brief breathing tests conducted in clinics, this method captured an entire day’s worth of breath data, encompassing waking and sleeping hours, moments of rest and stress.
“I thought it would be really hard to identify someone because everyone is doing different things, like running, studying, or resting,” said Soroka. “But it turns out their breathing patterns were remarkably distinct.”
And these patterns were more than just fingerprints for the breath. They hinted at the inner landscape of the mind and body.
Breathing as a Mirror of the Mind
What else could these “fingerprints” reveal? The scientists set out to find out.
In a cohort of 100 healthy young adults, Soroka and colleagues analyzed how breathing patterns correlated with traits like body mass index (BMI), anxiety, depression, and behavioral tendencies. Even subtle changes held meaning. People who scored higher on anxiety questionnaires, for instance, tended to have shorter inhales and more erratic pauses between breaths during sleep.
“Perhaps the way you breathe makes you anxious or depressed,” Sobel suggested. “If that’s true, we might be able to change the way you breathe to change those conditions.”
That’s a bold proposition — but not without precedent. Breathing techniques are already used in mindfulness practices, yoga, and clinical therapies.
What sets this research apart is the sheer granularity of the data. With 24 separate respiratory features — like inhale volume, pause duration, and asymmetry between nostrils — the team could build a high-resolution model of each participant’s breath, and track how it mapped onto emotional and cognitive states.
The potential implications are vast. Imagine a wearable device that doesn’t just track your steps or heart rate but offers real-time insights into your mental health.
The Brain’s Breathprint
This study supports an emerging view in neuroscience: that breathing is not just a bodily function but a cognitive one. The act of inhaling and exhaling is tied to activity in deep brain structures — some of which govern emotion, attention, and memory.
Earlier studies had shown that nasal breathing affects brain rhythms. Inhalation through the nose, for instance, can sharpen focus, influence how we perceive emotions, and even synchronize with brainwaves associated with memory recall. But this is the first time researchers have used those rhythms to tell people apart — and infer how they feel.
By using both domain-specific analysis (through a tool called BreathMetrics) and massive time-series feature extraction (7,729 features via a method called HCTSA), the team showed that breathing is not just idiosyncratic but incredibly stable over time. Even one hour of breath data — while not as accurate — could still identify someone at rates far above chance.
The method performed especially well during waking hours, though sleep data was also surprisingly informative. The study’s authors were cautious about claiming a “wake advantage,” noting that sleep sessions were more prone to technical issues, such as the cannula slipping out of place.
Still, the findings suggest that nasal airflow may serve as a kind of biometric signal — a living, breathing version of a retina scan.
From Diagnosis to Intervention?
There are practical hurdles. The current device, while unobtrusive by laboratory standards, may not be discreet enough for daily consumer use. “A tube under the nose is often associated with illness,” the team noted, and it may deter people from wearing the device casually.
They’re working on it. The researchers — some of whom are affiliated with a spin-off company, Sniff Logic Ltd. — are now developing a version that is smaller and more comfortable. The goal is to move beyond diagnostics and into therapeutics.
“We definitely want to go beyond diagnostics to treatment, and we are cautiously optimistic,” Sobel said.
This means asking a new kind of question: if your breath reveals your mental state, can training your breath improve it?
The researchers are already conducting new studies to explore whether mimicking “healthier” breathing patterns can change mood or cognition. If so, breath may become more than a marker. It may become a tool.
Breathing is a particularly interesting bodily function in the sense that it is both voluntary and involuntary. We can control it — up to a point — but it also runs in the background, shaped by emotions, thoughts, and neurochemistry. In many ways, it’s a perfect proxy for the mind-body connection.
For decades, researchers have explored how anxiety, depression, and even autism affect respiration. What this study shows is that those changes are detectable not just in extreme cases but in healthy individuals. Small variations in airflow, imperceptible to the naked eye, carry psychological signatures.
This doesn’t mean we’re on the verge of diagnosing mental health conditions through breath alone. The researchers emphasize that none of the participants met criteria for psychiatric disorders. But their findings suggest a path toward richer, more nuanced understanding — and perhaps gentler interventions.
As science begins to map this two-way street, one thing becomes clear: the breath, long overlooked as merely mechanical, may be one of the body’s most eloquent expressions.
The findings appeared in the journal Current Biology.
