Neurology and Yoga

Neuroscience Neurology and Yoga

The most interesting about neuroscience neurology is that it shows how yoga has the capacity to change your brain, and if it changes your brain it changes your neurology, it changes your nervous system, it changes your physiology. It can potentially change anything inside of you that might need changing or transforming. The two areas of research that are really cutting-edge currently, are the molecular biological approach and neuroimaging. Neuroimaging has the ability of these large machines to peer right into the brain activity and look at very discreet areas of the brain. It can look at changes in brain activity and also changes in brain structure.

What we are finding is that meditative practices can indeed change brain activity. When focusing on your attention you change brain activity in a very discrete way. Over time you actually change brain structure through what is called brain plasticity, and that means you end up with a brain that is conducive to the benefits and the practice that come along with contemplative practice like yoga teacher training and meditation. Changes are happening in the stress system as reflected in the nervous system.

The other cutting edge area of research in yoga is the molecular biological approach. This is looking at the action of neurotransmitters, at the action of actual molecules in the brain. For example there are studies that show that a major neurotransmitter is affected after a single yoga class and there are other studies that show that the expression of our DNA, the activity of our genes is actually changing with these practices. You actually change gene activity, you enhance gene activity that is good for you, things like the immune response is improved and you down-regulate gene activity that is bad for you if you are under chronic stress, things like inflammation.

These are the two cutting edge areas and they are bringing yoga into the biomechanical modern world. We are starting to see that yoga is not just a hobby, not just something that you practice on the side, this is real biological stuff, the activity of neurons in the brain is changed, the function within the body at the cellular and even at the molecular level is changing. It is very exciting that this research is really exploding at this point in time. It is very interesting to see the validation of what we have experienced on the behavior level that is now manifesting in scientific research.

What is important is that there is a recognition in medicine and in science, that there is something worth looking at more carefully. It would be great if medicine saw yoga in this way, but what really is important is that medicine and other research recognizes that there is something in here worth investigating.

There is an enormous amount that we can learn through conventional biomedical research on yoga, in fact, biomedical the research itself is evolving, it is able to allow us to peer into the body, in the brain in ways that were inconceivable just decades ago and so as this modern science evolve with things as described in neuroimaging, molecular biological approaches will allow us to use these tools to evaluate exactly how yoga is working.