Studies of voluntary and involuntary control of human breathing
Breathing is a complex motor task that needs to be coordinated at all times while we eat, speak, exercise and even during sleep. The breathing muscles are controlled automatically from the brainstem during normal breathing but can also be controlled voluntarily from the motor cortex. The way these two drives to the breathing muscles interact is still not well understood. While there is some evidence that there are at least two independent pathways, and that integration of the pathways occurs at the spinal cord, there is some uncertainty about whether these pathways may have some interaction in the brainstem. Our current experiments are looking at voluntary and involuntary drive to the breathing muscles to try to answer this fundamental question about the neural control of breathing. In addition we are looking at the potential cortical contributions to resting breathing in respiratory disorders.