It’s easy to control your breathing. Making yourself hyperventilate or breathe slowly and deeply is easy. Controlling your heart rate is harder. Typically, it takes some training to increase or decrease heart rate at will.
Training our bodies to change physiological processes normally considered to be beyond conscious control is referred to as biofeedback. Biofeedback is related to autogenic training, a technique I’ve practiced on and off since I’ve been a teenager. In autogenic training, you train yourself to increase blood flow to your arms and legs, making them feel heavier in warmer. You also regulate your heartbeat and breathing. Biofeedback is similar, except that you use measuring devices to get instant feedback. For example, you’d use a thermometer to measure if your arms and legs are actually getting warmer. Brain waves are another body function you can try to measure and regulate in biofeedback. For this, you’d use electroencephalography (EEGs).
The biggest reason why people practice biofeedback (or autogenic training, or meditation) is that they hope that it improves their health. There’s some evidence that the relaxation that ensues can lead to lower blood pressure and other health benefits.
Trying to use biofeedback to improve the effect of other treatments is, as far as I know, a completely new application. In a recent study, participants used fMRI to train themselves to increase the activity of the ventral tegmenal area (VTA). This brain area is associated with the mesolimbic pathway, the brain’s reward system.
After completion of their biofeedback training, the participants received a dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. After a few weeks, the immune response to the vaccine was quantified by measuring antibody levels. The patients who had learned to upregulate their VTA activity had an enhanced immune response to the vaccine compared to those who had not. For a vaccine, that’s exactly what you want to see.
This suggests that increasing activity of the brain area associated with rewards and the expectation of positive outcomes can lead to better treatment responses. These results also hint at the mesolimbic being behind the placebo response. Nobody yet knows if this will generalize to other treatments. If it does, I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about it.
Nehaveigur 