The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (36 page)

The cottage industry employs similar methods. In his book on writing, Davis recommends postures and types of breathing and awareness meant to quiet the cerebral din and help writers come up with fresh ideas. Doing something as simple as inhaling as long as one exhales, he advises, can become “a quick way to calm the chatter.”

Science, it turns out, has uncovered at least one biochemical factor that promotes the quieting. It is GABA, the neurotransmitter we visited in the chapter on moods. Remarkably, its calming action has much in common with a much more famous way that artists have slowed their minds in order to aid their explorations.

Faulkner, Hemingway, Capote, and many other writers and artists in the twentieth century found not only comfort but inspiration in the bottle. The inebriation was so ubiquitous that a book,
Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers
, details the favorite drinks that the literary set imbibed in pursuit of relaxation and compositional fire.

Alcohol is a depressant that works beautifully to slow the brain. But its side effects are nasty. In the body, ethyl alcohol breaks down into toxins that can promote cancer as well as liver and brain damage, among other troubles.

Yoga is kinder. Yet its ability to calm the mind—to produce “a retardation of mental functions,” as Behanan put it—shares a common biochemical basis with alcohol. Both do at least part of their mental rejiggering by means of GABA, or gamma-aminobutyric acid. The neurotransmitter slows the firing of neurons, making them less excitable and thus calming the mind. Ethyl alcohol does the trick indirectly. Its binding to neurons produces a chemical environment that increases the power of the inhibitory neurotransmitter.

By contrast, yoga’s action is direct. The Boston team found that doing yoga caused levels of the potent neurotransmitter to rise, in one case nearly doubling. As many a yoga practitioner can attest, one result is a sense of physical and mental calming, of increased relaxation and reduced anxiety. Perhaps it is also the stuff of poetic inspiration.

Another factor in the
quieting of the mind centers on the differing nature of the brain’s hemispheres. In everyday life, the left side dominates. It excels at logic and language, as well as the din of cerebral chatter. But an emerging body of scientific evidence suggests that yoga can activate the brain’s right hemisphere—the one that tends to govern intuition, creativity, instincts, aesthetics, spatial reasoning, and the sensing and expressing of emotion. So the discipline may act as an inspirational force in part because it shifts the hemispheric balance toward a more artistic frame of mind.

It has taken decades for scientists to tease the secrets of hemispheric character into the open and learn how the brain’s two halves deal with the world in remarkably different ways. When the Greens did their studies in the 1960s and 1970s, the details were sketchy. But soon thereafter, the field made rapid progress, thanks in no small part to the investigations of Roger Sperry, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology. In 1981, he won a Nobel Prize for his trouble.

Sperry focused on epileptics who had undergone an operation to ease their seizures. It severed the corpus callosum—the bundle of nerves that transmits signals between the brain’s right and left hemispheres. Sperry and colleagues gave these patients special tasks. The surprising results showed that the differing sides of their brains had distinctive forms of consciousness. In effect, Sperry showed that every individual on the planet is endowed with not one but two brains, each pursuing its own particular way of thinking, perceiving, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting. His discoveries threw a generation of neuroscientists into uncovering the details of hemispheric specialization.

Today, the most basic difference between the two halves is considered to be how they process information. The right brain (which controls the body’s left side) does its handiwork in parallel fashion—taking in many streams of information simultaneously from the senses and creating an overall impression of smell and sound, appearance and texture, feeling and sensation. For instance, the right brain dominates an inconspicuous type of sensory activity that yoga seeks to develop—proprioception, or inner knowledge of limb position. On the mat or in life, it tells us the position of our arms and legs—even with eyes shut. Proprioception, like other body functions
dominated by the right brain, works best at portraying the big picture, at delivering impressions. It produces what is known in psychology as a gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is holistic.

By contrast, the left brain works in a sequential fashion. It excels at logic and language, math and science, reading and writing. The left brain revels in detail, in pattern recognition, in making judgments of social rank, and in putting things into the order of past, present, and future.

The right brain could hardly be more different. It is timeless and nonverbal, dealing in the eternal now, in the universe of sensory experience and emotion. It sees a flower and rejoices at its beauty and wholeness. The left brain sees the differing parts—the stem and petals, stamens and pistils. It anticipates the steps needed to bring the flower indoors—the shears, the vase, the water, the display setting. The right brain sees the flower as a lover would, the left brain as a florist.

The right brain’s lack of regimentation makes a mess of exacting requirements but stands out when it comes to creativity, to seeing things in new ways, to thinking outside the box. It explores the possibilities of the moment. It cares little for social judgments but revels in spontaneity and adventure. It sees chaos not as a misfortune but as an opportunity for fresh perceptions and novel insights. It celebrates the new.

Modern neuroscience holds that many aspects of creativity (like most complex tasks) require the contributions of both halves of the brain and their complementary skills. An example is learning to play music. The left brain excels at such narrow responsibilities as reading notes, memorizing an instrument’s pattern of fingering, and drilling scales over and over. The right brain adds the zing. It introduces the spice of improvisation, of playing by ear, of endowing the score with the color of emotion and personal interpretation.

Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist trained at Harvard, has detailed many of these findings in her remarkable book
My Stroke of Insight.
Dramatically, she told of how she suffered a left-brain stroke that turned the abstractions of hemispheric differentiation into a riveting drama. A blood clot the size of a golf ball destroyed her powers of analysis and language, leaving her stranded in the joyous, peaceful, intuitive, sensory-rich world of her right brain.

“I felt like
a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.” Luckily for happy endings and the writing of books, Taylor in time recovered her left-hemisphere skills. That success led her to feel a consuming urge to tell not only about the surprising plasticity of the human brain but the benefits of learning how to empower its right side.

Taylor portrayed the first step of the rightward shift as a willingness to live in the moment, in the here and now. The mind has to slow down, to lessen the left brain’s fixation on analyzing and deliberating. She recommended drawing attention to breathing, to relaxing, to focusing on the constant stream of sensory information, and to feeling the resulting sensations. Her advice resembled the Buddhist practice known as mindfulness as well as the kind of awareness that yoga recommends, especially in Savasana. It also recalled the kind of relaxation that the Greens had the college students do.

In passing, Taylor mentioned yoga as a way in which many people “shift their minds.” But she gave no details of how yoga works and limited her remarks to general observations about paying attention as a means of shifting the balance of hemispheric dominance.

Recent science has suggested that yoga and meditation can in fact stimulate the workings of the right brain. The studies tend to be small and preliminary but are nonetheless intriguing. Andrew Newberg, a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia, led much of the research. In the 1990s, he began to study whether experienced meditators could alter the workings of their brains. In 2001, he and his colleagues reported that brain scans of eight meditators showed an increased flow of blood in the right thalamus. The pair of small organs above the brain stem and below the corpus callosum relay sensory messages to the outer brain and the hypothalamus—the control center of the autonomic nervous system and the body’s metabolic pitch.

Newberg and colleagues presented a more detailed portrait in 2007, drawing on results with twelve meditators and a control group. Here, too, the scientists found increased activity in the right thalamus.

Yoga eventually caught Newberg’s eye. He did a preliminary study that involved two men and two women, their mean age forty-five. None of the subjects had significant experience in yoga or meditation, and all underwent three months of
Iyengar training. The subjects performed their yoga routines daily, initially with a teacher and eventually at home with a DVD. The routine ran for roughly an hour and consisted of more than a dozen poses, including the Downward Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana) and the Seated Forward Bend with Bent Leg (Janu Sirsasana). The students also did rhythmic breathing in the form of Ujjayi pranayama as well as progressive relaxation and meditation.

Seated Forward Bend with Bent Leg,
Janu Sirsasana

The scientists scanned the brains of the subjects at the start of the three months and at the end. In 2009, Newberg and six colleagues reported the results. “We found greater overall activations in the right hemisphere rather than the left,” the scientists wrote. The areas of heightened blood flow included the frontal lobe, the seat of higher consciousness, and the prefrontal cortex, the well-developed region of the brain that distinguishes humans from other mammals. Both areas are important to setting and achieving goals, such as accomplishing the precise limb rearrangements of Iyengar yoga.

In closing, the investigators added that scientists in the future would have to conduct more thorough studies to sharpen their understanding and discover which parts of the typical yoga routine most influenced the rightward shift.

Over the decades, science has identified another aspect of hemispheric specialization that appears to bear strongly on the issue of creativity as well as the artistic lifestyle—if such a thing exists. The evidence suggests that the right hemisphere orchestrates not only emotion and spatial reasoning but the primal rumblings of sex.

The clues emerged as
neuroscientists moved from electroencephalograms to scans that let them see heightened activity in the deep recesses of the brain. The studies linked sexual excitement to the lighting up of the right hemisphere and in particular its frontal and prefrontal areas. In seeking to explain the findings, scientists proposed that the frontal regions of the brain were producing the racy images and thoughts basic to sexual arousal—the glitter of daydream and desire, memory and fantasy. The studies indicated that the frontal regions tended to retain their glow even as levels of sexual excitement rose and (in step with fast breathing and other physical accelerations) the brain shifted its overall emphasis from cortical to limbic control.

While the association of sex and artistry may be new to neuroscience, it is extremely old stuff for the world at large and long predates Freud’s theories about sexual energy being a stimulus to creativity. Indeed, the portraits of artists so regularly depict them as beholden to Eros that the image of promiscuity is a literary cliché. The list of the famously profligate includes not only Garbo and Stokowski but Oscar Wilde, Modigliani, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Goya, Picasso, Marlon Brando, Hemingway, Frida Kahlo, and hundreds of others. The free spirits are seen as embracing whatever comes their way, be it lovers, food, or intellectual passions.

Science has addressed the issue and found evidence that supports the risqué stereotype. In 2006, the
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London
, one of the world’s most venerable journals, reported on a study of four hundred and twenty-five British men and women. The inquiry categorized the levels of creativity among the subjects into four groupings—none, hobby, serious, and professional. The scientists found that the serious artists and poets on average had twice as many sex partners as the less creative types. Moreover, the professional artists tended to have the most lovers of all.

What all this means for yoga is unclear. The complexities of the brain and behavior are legion, as are the difficulties of establishing cause and effect. But yoga’s ability to promote a rightward shift would seem to reinforce the idea that the discipline can act as a sexual tonic. At a minimum, the finding adds to the existing evidence about yoga’s stimulating effects on human sexuality, as we saw in the case of hormones and brain waves. And it may ultimately shed light on human behavior. For the moment,
the rightward shift suggests what might be considered a possible clue to how the discipline goes about heightening the artistic impulse.