Yoga Effects on Brain Health: A Systematic Review of the Current Literature

What I find thought-provoking though is the use of the phase "health approach" in the first line of the abstract:

> Yoga is the most popular complementary health approach practiced by adults in the United States.

I wonder what exactly qualifies as a "health approach". The paper acknowledges exercise is well know to be good for people, particularly in ageing - so it's heathy, but is exercise an "approach"? What about reading, or caring for young children (both also good for your health) can that be a "health approach"?

I usually try to talk about these practices as being part of a heathy lifestyle, rather than being therapies. I feel that we're over-medicalising when we start to say that riding a bicycle or hugging our friends are therapies, rather than just being healthy.

I enjoy yoga immensely and I feel that I have granted myself a gift that will last a lifetime. I am not spiritual and was not flexible before starting so I wouldn’t count those are barriers for getting benefit from the practice. I do try to suspend my beliefs about spirituality as well as I can during practice which has worked well for me.

I started with the C1 classes at CorePower which I’d recommend to beginners who are interested.

1) I am happier. No doubt about it. Situations where my memory recalls that my self was typically unhappy in have been turned around. I find myself content when I am "supposed to be" frustrated at various things like traffic, intense situations, etc.

2) Older people at the studio look younger than me. Not everybody of course. But a significant number of the elderly people who have a daily practice look as young and spry as any one of the youngest children who come into the studio. (They host kids yoga classes occasionally).

I am laying here in half lotus right now actually, counting down the last few minutes at home here until I leave for today's class.

I can hardly wait!

For example: "Increase in right hippocampal GM density among yoga group." Why is this a good thing? Let's not even talk about the physical inappropriateness of using "density" to discuss MRI results.

Using meaningless-but-easy measurements as a surrogate / proxy for meaningful-but-hard measurements is an entire field called "biomarkers". It's incredibly challenging in neurology, and we don't have many good, validated biomarkers. If you want to use "MRI density" (sic), or "fMRI activation", then first you need an entire study to prove that the biomarker is valid. This a subtle point, but it's as if you're counting lines of code to determine the best programming language: yes, it's a measure, but how does it relate, and what does it mean?

We all (including doctors) want things that are natural, wholistic, and give us a subjective sense of well-being (like exercise and mindfulness) to be magically effective. But that doesn't change the need for rigorous science in order to know that it's the case.

And the formula is always the same: a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial within a representative population using a directly meaningful outcome.

This review failed the "meaningful outcome" part, even if (and I personally don't care to look further) they got the rest of pieces right.

Although it’s harder to study and learn a programming language, even just for 2-3 hours a week, than it is to do something physically intense with group pressure. I think mostly the ease of studying and practicing is what limits me. Going to yoga is the hardest part, once there it’s relatively straightforward to complete it.

If I setup a system to intensely learn with limited technical friction (ie frustration of a slow environment with a clear path to what to learn), then I could overcome this. Of course, ultimately it just comes down to my choice.

I try to be open minded about stuff and am always interested in various ways to take care of ones body. But by far the most difficult part of figuring out what to do is that information sources touting benefits are also like.... telling me that this jade bracelet is good for my aura or something.

I mean I’m not a geologist but.... pretty sure there’s not much basis in some of this stuff.

Anyways I try to give the benefit of the doubt to things I don’t know about but a lot of sources make that realllly tough!

I started with no prior experience at age 39 nine months ago, and have gone to 140 classes since.

My happiness, attentiveness, and friendliness have all increased to the point that I am hardly recognizable, mentally, as the same person I was one year ago.

In addition to the effort and focus you have to put in during class there are other benefits, like seeing and feeling muscles you never knew existed growing and strengthening, having better posture and balance, and getting a good night's sleep every night after practice (because you're so damned tired).

On top of all of that, my studio is full of very friendly and welcoming instructors and my fellow students are just as nice, so I've made tons of new friends-- which is really hard to do when you are a working adult.

I've also lost 40lbs since March. Because I'm so tall, one hour of yoga burns about 580 calories on average for me, and I feel better afterwards-- not worse like with some other forms of physical activity.

But I didn't go for weight loss so that's just a nice bonus.

I'm relatively sure that the same could be said for many forms of physical activity, but yoga seems more suited to a variety of people regardless of age or physical ability.

Having become a bit enamored by yoga, I've started recommending to everyone I know, including my elderly parents, that they at least try it.

I see more and more people attending these types of activities because of “doctors orders”. And in many cases I see sports of any from just compliment whatever regiment the doctor has set out for the patient to begin with. I guess this is where physio has its place in the medical world as well, where patients need specific exercises to help with specific injuries.

Anyway, I want to point out the differences between the soft and hard approaches in the martial arts because I think it’s relevant. Not only are both approaches pretty much contradictory to each other but I find that what people find case-by-case within each practice can differ completely, which makes the whole thing quite subjective and difficult to measure.

The hard approaches are more fueled around explosive movements and repetitive training. From the students’ perspective the left to right body movement from this type of training is something that I’ve seen people with strokes or brain related illnesses use as a tool to help rebalance their motor coordination. In some cases I’ve heard people recommend dance because of the left right approach that comes with dancing, so not much to do with the style itself but rather the constant reshifting from the left to the right during training helps in this area, which has more to do with training methodology.

Where as for the softer arts, although you usually have to explain the advantages to the student, soft arts are more geared around slow movement and are aimed around longevity.

Personally I’m a bigger fan of the softer arts, simply because I prefer low resistance training myself, plus anyone with an injury who is looking for a sport, low resistance will be the better approach.

The issue I have with soft styles is that I have read a bit about Tai Chi and the medical studies surrounding Tai Chi. Sufficed to say the medical studies in this particular area have not gone well, in many cases citing little to no evidence that soft styles help with age reduction.

Although the evidence us martial arts teachers rely on are the case studies of our masters, for instance master x from martial art y lived until he was 100 and that’s because he practiced martial art y since he was 10, and so fourth. What I’d find interesting is if there are more substantial studies made in this area, I mean after all finding the fountain of youth is pretty much everyone’s dream.

> This review of literature reveals promising early evidence that yoga practice can positively impact brain health. Studies suggest that yoga practice may have an effect on the functional connectivity of the DMN, the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex while engaged in cognitive tasks, and the structure of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex- all regions known to show significant age-related changes [65, 66]. Therefore, behavioral interventions like yoga may hold promise to mitigate age-related and neurodegenerative declines. Systematic randomized trials of yoga and its comparison to other exercise-based interventions, as well as long term longitudinal studies on yoga practitioners are needed to identify the extent and scope of neurobiological changes.

With studies like this, my reaction is to assume that it's not really about yoga, but rather just making a habit out of doing exercise and spending some time focused on something other than your cell phone or a computer.

There are plenty of good ways to get exercise and manage your attention, but you don't need buzzwords to accomplish that. Taking long walks without bringing your cellphone along (or leaving it in your pocket with notifications off) is a simple, cheaper (assuming you pay for yoga classes), and equally effective way to do this.

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I could predict that yoga has a good effect on brain health since I have the following hypothesis: whatever you do with a serious attentive concentration will be good for your brain in that specific area.

One question I have left is: to what extent will one be able to go beyond that area and use their cognitive benefits for similar but different pursuits?

I also have a hypothesis for that (I just don't know to what extent it's true, I read some research on it but it's all quite tentative). It is: if one specifically focuses on an area, then the benefit will be specific. However, if one chooses a meta-topic (e.g. learning as fast as possible, increasing memory or increasing attention span), then that meta-topic will be trained and that person will be good in the meta-topic across all cognition. This presumes they are immersed in training this meta-topic though (i.e. it's everywhere in their life).

Examples:

1 (normal topic). One chooses to be amazing at chess, and just at chess. Then, the brain benefits will only be helpful for chess.

2 (meta-topic). One chooses to learn as fast as possible, and chooses chess as the medium to measure progress. That person will be able to learn as fast as possible on many more domains. In part, also I presume that such a person is actively trying to use the meta principles from learning chess as fast as possible to solve other problems in their life.

So they're not doing the same things. One is learning chess, and the other one is learning to play chess as fast as possible with the broader scope to learn anything as fast as possible.

One complicating factor is that the normal chess player can try to organize the meta-topics they have learned while playing chess. While this helps, I'd argue it's simply less effective than what the second person would be doing. It's similar to architecting a software product to do certain things from the get go (person 2) or patching your software product afterwards to do that same thing (person 1).

I think tribal socialization is a better explanation for meditation's growing popularity than “watching your thoughts like a river.”