Breathing and voluntary action are more tightly linked than they appear. A new peer-reviewed study in Scientific Reports tested whether the phase of breathing can alter “intentional binding,” a subtle timing effect often used to study the sense of agency — the feeling that we are the authors of our own actions.
The researchers, led by Hiroshi Shibata of Nagoya University with collaborators in the UK and Japan, used a Libet-clock paradigm in which participants made voluntary key presses while tracking the timing of their actions and the tones that followed. At the same time, the team monitored respiration and cardiac phase to ask whether internal bodily rhythms influence how closely action and consequence are perceived in time.
The study begins from an increasingly important idea in consciousness research: the sense of self may not be produced by the brain in isolation. Interoception — the brain’s monitoring of breathing, heartbeat and other internal signals — may contribute to the way the mind constructs a continuous feeling of being an embodied agent.
The most robust result was not that breathing changed intentional binding. It did not. The researchers successfully replicated respiration–action coupling, meaning voluntary actions were not distributed randomly across the respiratory cycle. But Bayesian analyses strongly favored models in which intentional binding itself did not reliably vary with respiratory phase.
That negative result matters because it separates two questions that are often blurred together. The body can influence when actions are initiated without necessarily changing the subjective temporal binding between action and outcome. In other words, physiological rhythms may bias behavior while leaving at least one implicit measure of agency relatively stable.
The study also found an exploratory cardiac-phase effect in one frequentist analysis, but the Bayesian comparison did not provide strong support for it. The authors therefore treat that result cautiously rather than presenting it as evidence that the heartbeat controls the sense of agency.
This places the work directly inside a long-running philosophical debate. Libet-style experiments are often invoked in discussions about free will because they examine the timing of voluntary action and conscious intention. The new study does not resolve that debate, and it does not show that breathing “controls” choice. Instead, it adds a more embodied layer: voluntary behavior unfolds inside rhythmic physiological systems rather than in a disembodied decision-making machine.
That distinction is relevant to contemplative traditions as well. Breath-focused practices have long treated respiration as a bridge between automatic bodily processes and deliberate awareness. The present findings do not validate spiritual claims about breath, but they do provide a measurable example of respiration being coupled to voluntary action even when the subjective sense of agency remains comparatively unchanged.
The broader implication is less dramatic but more interesting: the self may be built from several partially independent processes. The timing of action, the feeling of authorship, bodily rhythms and conscious awareness may interact without collapsing into a single mechanism.
For readers interested in the relationship between breath and contemplative practice, see Templum Dianae’s guide to meditation in Hinduism.