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Ghatkopar yoga Center Follow. Consciousness PowerPoint. Personality development presentation. Yoga Presentation. Jyoti Tratak. Mudra and bandh. Yama niyam diploma Yog vyayam. Related Books Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd. Dry: A Memoir Augusten Burroughs. Thus, meditation is a means to increase brain power. So, yoga asanas, super brain yoga, breathing, and meditation can all stimulate your brain power.
Spare some time every day and lead a smarter life! Practicing Yoga helps develop the body and mind, yet is not a substitute for medicine. It is essential to learn and practice yoga under the supervision of a trained Yoga teacher. In case of any medical condition, practice yoga only after consulting your doctor and a Sri Sri Yoga teacher. Operating in countries, The Art of Living is a non-profit, educational and humanitarian organization founded in by the world-renowned humanitarian and spiritual teacher, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar whose vision is a stress-free and violence-free world.
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Here are some pranayamas and yoga asanas for a more effecient brain:. Bhramari Pranayama Bee Breathing. Paschimottanasana Seated Forward Bend Stretches the spine and helps relieve stress. Relaxes the mind by removing negative emotions like irritability and anger. Learn how to treat yo ur mind, body, and emotions with the processes taught in The Art of Living Meditation and Breath workshop. Learn More. Sarvangasana Shoulder Stand Regulates and normalizes the functioning of the thyroid and parathyroid glands.
Nourishes the brain as more blood reaches the pineal and hypothalamus glands. Helps improve all cognitive functions. Halasana Plow Pose Helps improve blood flow to the brain and calm the nervous system.
Stretches the back and neck, reducing stress and fatigue. Join a Free workshop on Yoga, Meditation and Breath. Villemure and colleagues [ 26 ] investigated whether the correlation of age with total GM volume of the whole brain differed between a group of yoga-practitioners and non-practitioners. While within the group of healthy adults without yoga experience, a negative correlation was observed between age and the total GM volume of the brain, no relationship was found between age and brain structure within the group of yoga-practitioners.
However, the difference in slopes between the groups was not statistically significant. Non-practitioners did not exhibit larger or thicker brain structures compared to experienced yoga-practitioners in any of these studies. In comparison to the aforementioned cross-sectional studies, studies employing yoga interventions have investigated how the structure of the brain changes as a result of relatively short-term yoga practice. Hariprasad and colleagues [ 27 ] measured changes in the GM volume of the bilateral hippocampus and the superior occipital gyrus, which served as a control region, following a 6-month yoga intervention.
Participants consisted of healthy older adults who underwent an hour of formal training 5 days a week for 3 months and then completed the same daily regimen at home for an additional 3 months with regular booster training sessions. Another study [ 28 ] also evaluated changes in the GM volume of the bilateral hippocampus, as well as in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, but they did so in participants with mild cognitive impairment who completed a week intervention consisting of weekly 1-hour sessions of either Kundalini yoga with Kirtan Kriya or memory-enhancement training.
Both groups also completed 12 minutes of daily homework that was related to their intervention. Unlike previous studies, the results of a mixed effects model showed the volume change of the bilateral hippocampus did not differ between the two groups, but that the change in volume of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex was different for the two intervention groups.
Within the memory enhancement group, there was a trend toward increased volume of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex following the intervention, a change that was not observed within the yoga group. It is possible that the shorter length of this intervention weeks in comparison to the 6-month intervention utilized by Hariprasad and colleagues [ 27 ] explains the differences in study results pertaining to hippocampal volume.
However, since memory-enhancement training targets a single aspect of cognition and thus is likely to directly target areas involved in memory, it may not serve as an equal comparison group for yoga, whose effects are exerted in a more indirect fashion.
They did this by comparing changes in GM density among healthy young adults after a week intervention in which participants self-selected enrollment in a Hatha yoga, sport control, or passive control group.
Although the yoga and sport control groups both underwent 10 hours of weekly practice which involved similar body movements, the meditation and breathing components of holistic yoga practice were not incorporated into the workouts performed by the sport control group. Unlike participants in these groups, who had not participated in their selected activities for at least 6 months prior to the intervention, participants in the passive control group did not alter any of their daily habits.
No differences were observed between the yoga and passive control groups, but compared to the sport group, GM density of the yoga group was shown to increase in five regions and decrease in three regions following intervention.
The only region to show an effect specific to the yoga intervention was the right hippocampus, which showed increased GM density over time within the yoga group and decreased GM density over time within the sport control group. Interestingly, this region showed significantly lower GM density at baseline for the yoga group compared to the two control groups. Neither gender or height differences were found to explain this, and no other sociodemographic characteristics were found to differ between the groups, but based on known links between the hippocampus, stress, and blood pressure, the authors suggest that individuals who are vulnerable to stress may have been driven to select yoga due to its known relaxation benefits.
The second general strategy employed by researchers to investigate the effects of yoga practice on brain structure is to characterize the specific nature of the relationship between yoga practice and brain structure among experienced yoga practitioners.
However, evaluating how each of the different components of yoga practice i. Two of the cross-sectional studies already mentioned 25, 26 investigated relationships of this nature. After identifying regions of the brain in which yoga-practitioners exhibited greater GM volume than non-practitioners, Froeliger and colleagues 25 looked within these regions to identify areas where years of yoga practice was correlated with GM volume.
They found that the extent of yoga experience within yoga-practitioners was positively related to volume of frontal, limbic, temporal, occipital, and cerebellar regions, while no regions showed a negative association between years of yoga practice and GM volume. Villemure and colleagues [ 26 ] also sought to identify a dose-dependent relationship between GM volume, years of yoga practice and current weekly yoga practice as reported by the yoga-practitioners.
In addition to investigating this dose-dependent relationship between yoga practice and brain structure, the researchers conducted multiple regressions to evaluate how well each aspect of yoga practice predicted GM volume in the areas found to correlate with weekly yoga practice. Commonality analysis allowed them to divide the amount of variation in GM volume that was accounted for by all the predictors into the percentage of the effect unique to each predictor and common to each combination of 2 or more predictors.
Three of these studies were cross-sectional in nature, with two comparing task-related brain activation and the other comparing functional brain connectivity between experienced yoga-practitioners and non-practitioners. Figure 3 represents the brain regions identified across the 3 studies based on the task-related fMRI findings. In addition to investigating differences in GM volume, our own work [ 24 ] evaluated how yoga-practitioners and non-practitioners differed in brain function during subcomponents of a Sternberg working memory task.
Froeliger and colleagues [ 30 ] used the same sample of yoga practitioners and non-practitioner controls who showed differences in GM volume [ 25 ] to investigate differences in task-related activation during an affective Stroop task.
One focus of this fMRI study was to evaluate effects of yoga on emotional reactivity by considering the impact of group, the emotional valence of images viewed, and the interaction of group and valence on the BOLD response to viewing emotional images.
A significant interaction was noted in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex middle frontal gyrus , and further investigation demonstrated that the percent signal change in this region was greater when viewing neutral images compared to negative images among non-practitioners.
Meanwhile, among yoga-practitioners, the percent signal change in this region was lesser than that observed in non-practitioners regardless of whether the image had a negative or neutral emotional valence. Across all participants, the percent signal change in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was negatively correlated with the percent signal change in the amygdala when viewing negative images, but not when viewing neutral images.
The second aim of the study was to identify how yoga experience alters the impact of emotional distraction on the Stroop-BOLD response. To investigate this, the main effects of group, the emotional valence of the distractor image, and the interaction between these on the BOLD response during the Stroop contrast incongruent vs congruent number grids were considered. Furthermore, the percent signal change of the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex was greater among yoga-practitioners if a negative distractor was presented than if a neutral distractor was presented, while the opposite pattern was observed within the group of non-practitioners.
Positive affect was shown to decrease significantly from baseline to the completion of the affective Stroop task among all participants and this change was positively correlated with the response to viewing negative images in the left amygdala.
Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between this response and group, such that among non-practitioners a greater response to viewing negative emotional images was related to greater decreases in positive affect. Among yoga-practitioners, however, this relationship between amygdala BOLD response to negative emotional images and change in affect was not present.
Unlike the previous two studies, which utilized fMRI to identify brain activation occurring during engagement in a cognitive task, a recent cross-sectional study [ 31 ] utilized fMRI to identify whether yoga practice is related to functional brain connectivity. While a decrease in resting state functional connectivity is often associated with aging, this study suggests that yoga may reverse this age-related effect among older female subjects. Other studies investigated longitudinal changes in the functional connectivity of the brain function following yoga intervention.
One such study conducted by Eyre and colleagues [ 32 ] utilized fMRI to examine how the functional connectivity of the brain at rest changed following a week intervention with either yoga or memory-enhancement training, as previously described in summarizing the results of Yang et al.
Results showed that improvements in verbal memory recall were positively associated with changes in connectivity primarily within areas of the default mode network. Specifically, this effect was present in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, frontal medial cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, and lateral occipital cortex for both of the intervention groups.
Similarly, changes in functional connectivity of the left inferior frontal gyrus, found in the language network, were also positively associated with changes in verbal memory recall for both groups. However, the relationship between changes in connectivity and memory was no longer significant in the posterior cingulate cortex or inferior frontal gyrus within the yoga intervention group after removal of an outlier.
While an area within the superior parietal network near the precentral and postcentral gyri exhibited a negative relationship between changes in functional connectivity and changes in visuospatial memory, the authors interpreted this negative association to be reflective of enhanced efficiency following intervention.
A week intervention was used in another study [ 33 ] to investigate whether changes in cerebral blood flow CBF measured with single-photon emission computed tomography were influenced by Iyengar yoga during baseline and meditation scans among four patients with mild hypertension. The right amygdala, dorsal medial cortex and sensorimotor areas showed decreases in baseline CBF following the intervention.
Meanwhile, activation was greater during meditation in the right prefrontal cortex, sensorimotor cortex, inferior frontal lobe, superior frontal lobe and the right and left dorsal medial frontal lobes following yoga training.
Furthermore, the greater activity of the left anterior cingulate, dorsomedial frontal cortex, and superior temporal lobe, relative to the right, was more prominent after the intervention. Following yoga training, laterality preference for the left over the right during meditation compared to baseline also became more pronounced.
Our review of the yoga-imaging literature suggests that behavioral mind-body interventions such as yoga practice can affect the anatomy of the brain. Yoga practice appears to be linked to anatomical changes in the frontal cortex, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex and insula. Throughout the studies reviewed, yoga practice showed a consistent positive relationship with measures of brain structure i.
GM volume, GM density, cortical thickness , such that regions showing an effect of yoga practice were greater in experts or had more gain following intervention. Differences in brain function between yoga-practitioners and non-practitioners have been observed in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, with yoga-practitioners showing less activation during both working memory and affective Stroop tasks. Additionally, yoga-practitioners differed from non-practitioners within the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, superior frontal gyrus, and amygdala during other aspects of the affective Stroop task.
Studies investigating changes in the functional connectivity of the brain following yoga practice have primarily identified increases in the default mode network, one of which found that those changes were related to memory performance. Although the direction of differences in brain function between yoga-practitioners and non-practitioners may be inconsistent, it is the interpretation of those differences and what they imply about the potential utility of yoga practice in maintaining brain health that are of ultimate interest.
Given the complex nature of the brain, there is often more than one way something can exert an effect. This, in addition to the specific task being used, individual differences in the way participants strategize, and other differences in study design could account for differences in results across studies.
Findings that link the pattern of brain functioning observed in yoga-practitioners to performance or health outcomes offer support for the beneficial influence of yoga on brain function. Evidence suggests that global GM declines with age [ 34 ] while physical activity and cardiovascular fitness [ 35, 36 ] as well as mindfulness [ 21, 22 ] have shown to confer neuro-protective effects.
The holistic practice of yoga combines physical activity in the form of postures with yoga-based meditative and breathing exercises. The findings from studies reviewed in this paper are therefore not surprising and suggest that yoga confers similar cortical neuro-protective effects.
These findings could not only have a significant public health impact on cognitive aging but also call for exercise neuroscientists to design systematic trials to test the efficacy and effectiveness of yoga practice in comparison to other forms of physical activity and mindfulness practices.
A majority of the studies highlight changes in hippocampal volume following yoga practice. The hippocampus is known to be critically involved in learning and memory processes [ 37 ]. Yoga effects on the hippocampus are also aligned with findings from the aerobic exercise literature [ 38 ], as well as the mindfulness literature [ 39 ], suggesting that exercise alone and mindfulness alone, as well as a combination of the two in the form of yoga practice, have a positive effect on this critical brain structure implicated in age-related neurodegenerative diseases and chronic stress [ 19, 40 ].
Other than the hippocampus, work of Froelinger and colleagues [ 25 ] suggests that yoga practitioners have higher GM volume in a number of regions including frontal i. Experimental and lesion studies indicate these brain structures are involved with tasks of cognitive control [ 41 ], inhibition of automatized or prepotent responses [ 42 ], the contextually appropriate selection and coordination of actions [ 43 ], and reward evaluation and decision making [ 44, 45 ].
The cerebellum, a brain structure known for decades as integral to the precise coordination and timing of body movements [ 46 ], has more recently been acknowledged to be involved in cognition, specifically executive function [ 47, 48 ]. The studies reviewed also implicate the role of yoga in functioning of the dlPFC and the amygdala see Fig. Gothe et al.
Froelinger et al. Task-relevant targets activate the dlPFC, whereas emotional distractors activate the amygdala [ 49 ]. Exerting cognitive control over emotional processes leads to increased activation in the dlPFC, with corresponding reciprocal deactivation in the amygdala [ 50, 51 ].
The studies suggest that when emotional experience occurred within the context of a demanding task situation, yoga practitioners appeared to resolve emotional interference via recruitment of regions of the cortex that subserve cognitive control. Plausibly, these findings may indicate that yoga practitioners selectively recruit neurocognitive resources to disengage from negative emotional information processing and engage the cognitive demands presented by working memory and inhibitory control tasks demonstrating overall neurocognitive resource efficiency.
Brain regions showing differential task-related activation in yoga-practitioners. Yoga practitioners showed less activation than non-practitioners in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the encoding phase of a Sternberg Working Memory task yellow. Yoga practitioners also showed less activation than non-practitioners in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right superior frontal gyri, but more activation in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during various aspects of an Affective Stroop task red.
A network of neural structures including the frontal lobe, the anterior cingulate cortex, the infero-temporal lobe and the parietal cortex are known to be involved in cognitive operations including stimulus processing and memory updating [ 52, 53 ]. In our reviewed studies, Eyre et al. Villemure et al. Collectively these results are promising and corroborate the aerobic exercise literature, as the anterior cingulate cortex is one of the brain structures that shows disproportional changes as a result of participation in moderate intensity physical activity [ 55 ].
Many of these regions are part of the default mode network, which is typically activated during rest and deactivated when an individual is engaged in an external task [ 56 ].
Following a yoga intervention, increases in connectivity of regions in the DMN were associated with improvements in verbal memory recall [ 32 ]. Although yoga-cognition has emerged as a topical area in the field of exercise neuroscience, the studies are preliminary and lack the rigorous methodology that is applied in the exercise-cognition literature.
Sample sizes for yoga studies have ranged from 4 to participants and a majority of the work has been cross-sectional in nature. While the beauty of yoga lies in the diverse and modifiable combinations of postures, breathing and meditative exercises, this concurrently poses a challenge for scientists to compare findings across studies. Furthermore, there is no standardized definition for a yoga practitioner, nor a universal standard for certification. Of the yoga practitioners sampled in the reviewed studies, their experience ranged from regular practice 3—5 days a week for 3 to 16 years.
This poses a challenge to compare research findings across studies. Although cross-sectional studies limit us in our ability to draw casual conclusions, such a design can provide certain advantages over the use of interventional studies design in identifying the effects of yoga practice on the brain given that 9. Nonetheless, it is the promise of yoga as an intervention for individuals with various health issues that has sparked much of the growing interest in the effects of yoga practice on brain structure and function, since its established cognitive benefits and accessibility to people with a wide range of physical capabilities suggest it may be an effective intervention for typical and pathological cognitive decline among older adults.
Yet for yoga interventions to have clinical utility in such circumstances, compliance to the intervention program is a necessity. Future studies need to document and report attendance and adherence rates. The intervention studies also employed different frequencies, intensities and doses of yoga practice which resulted in heterogeneity across intervention designs as well.
While the reviewed studies examined the relationship between yoga and brain structure or function, only one [ 24 ] employed cognitive or behavioral assessments which correlate with the studied brain regions.
Another limitation among the reviewed studies is lack of reported data on the lifestyle characteristics of yoga practitioners. A national survey [ 59 ] found that, compared to the US average, yoga practitioners are more likely to be highly physically active, non-obese, and well-educated — each of which [ 60—62 ] are known to individually contribute to positive changes in brain structure and function.
The same survey also found that yoga practitioners are almost four times more likely to follow vegetarian or plant-based diets compared to the US population which could also contribute to brain health [ 63 ]. Future research should examine how the lifestyle characteristics of yoga practitioners may interact with the physical practice of yoga and contribute towards brain function and structure.
Unlike intervention studies and randomized trials, the design of cross-sectional studies limits the control researchers can exert on possible confounding or mediating variables. However, only three of these studies matched the groups on the levels of physical activity between the groups or their cardiovascular fitness levels.
Moving forward, researchers should conduct well-powered yoga interventions with appropriate controls to examine the neuroimaging outcomes. A variety of cognitive measures and neuroimaging analysis techniques have been used in the literature.
Perhaps a foundation would be to test yoga interventions against the established evidence for aerobic exercise and mindfulness practices. Designing randomized controlled trials with exercise and mindfulness comparison groups will allow us to further the literature with the goal of identifying the unique and holistic effects of exercise vs.
The literature is too nascent, and it would be premature to dive into comparisons between different styles of yoga practice. This is evident from the studies reviewed as none of them compared the effectiveness of one style of yoga versus another.
Lastly, it remains to be determined whether web-based yoga interventions will be as effective as in-person yoga interventions which were primarily utilized in the reviewed papers.
There has been an exponential growth in the development of mobile health apps [ 64 ] and it remains to be determined whether web-delivered yoga interventions will be as effective as in-person often group based interventions.
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