Not because this brief is so breath-taking (well, maybe), but because your breath paces and punctuates your attention and awareness. Whenever you start to give attention to any awareness of stimulus, you hold your breath! When you breathe again, that is part of a pattern where you are releasing your attention from the one focus of awareness and moving it on to wherever it will alight next.
The claim isn’t that conscious control of breathing affects attention (though that might be true), it’s that spontaneous changes in breathing shape attention.
Someone without much lung capacity might still have good attention for reading and other low-aerobic effort activities if their metabolism is ramped down enough so that they can get what they’re thinking about into their memory.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a connection between breath and attention, but I suspect it’s more complex. I might be able to introspect efficiently enough to find out what triggers spacing out, and it would be worth learning.
The claim isn’t that conscious control of breathing affects attention (though that might be true), it’s that spontaneous changes in breathing shape attention.
Someone without much lung capacity might still have good attention for reading and other low-aerobic effort activities if their metabolism is ramped down enough so that they can get what they’re thinking about into their memory.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a connection between breath and attention, but I suspect it’s more complex. I might be able to introspect efficiently enough to find out what triggers spacing out, and it would be worth learning.