Question: why have you chosen to look at people who smoke and breathing problems within smokers?

Sarah Finnegan answered on 20 Sep 2017:

Well people who smoke are a really good population to study because they have lots of problems with breathing. We are also interested in other groups, such as people who have asthma. We have actually just started a study now with people who have asthma to find out whether they can reliably tell us when we change how hard it is for them to breathe. We only change how hard it is to breathe a tiny bit and its amazing how some people are really confident in their answer but actually are super wrong. This is actually really cool because there is a similar finding when people with autism are detecting their own heart beating. We think it might be because people are not very in-tune with their own bodies.