Some researchers seek to validate yoga’s health benefits

BENGALURU: A group of medical researchers, affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, sought scientific legitimacy of the ancient Indian spiritual practice of yoga at a meeting on Sunday.

From the scientific benefits of chanting ‘Om’ to the improved levels of oxytocin among schizophrenia patients who practised yoga, the group of Indian neuroscientists presented clinical evidence trying to support claims that practicing yoga helps treat several ailments, including certain mental illness, at the 107th Indian Science Congress (ISC).

“Chanting Om deactivates certain brain centres that are implicated in our being emotionally unstable,” said BN Gangadhar, director of Bengalurubased National Institute of Medical and Neurological Sciences (Nimhans).


Gangadhar, a well-known neuroscientist who is also the Bengaluru head of the RSS, the parent organisation of India’s ruling BJP, argued that his team had demonstrated using “functional magnetic imaging” that chanting Om reduced the activity of the brain. “Using this argument, we went to apply yoga in several psychiatric disorders,” he added.

The Nimhans study looked at the concept of “connectedness” of yoga in improving the conditions of patients dealing with diseases like schizophrenia. It is a disease of the mind and disconnection, Gangadhar explained. The corpus callosum which connects two hemispheres of the brain is damaged in schizophrenia, so are the anterior to posterior connections. Even the default mode networks which connect different parts of the brain become dysfunctional in such cases.

This was the reason that Gangadhar looked if the connectedness of yoga improved the conditions of these patients. The study found that those patients who received yoga showed improved levels of connectedness and high levels of oxytocin — one of the so-called happy hormones — compared with those who were doing any other physical activity, he said.

The last few years of the ISC have been marred with controversy where several scientists objected to the presentations made by certain speakers, who presented writings of ancient Vedic texts as scientific studies. This led to many in the scientific community denounce the ISC as a non-serious science gathering.

The Yoga Science Congress was the only addition this year that tried to link the ancient yogic practices of Hinduism and improved health conditions.

Akshay Anand, a neuroscientist from Chandigarh, said he came to researching the cellular and molecular benefits of yoga because he was frustrated with a lack of progress in neurological drug research. “There is hardly any successful drug research that has transformed the field of neurosciences; that is why I wanted to look at yoga from the scientific perspective using quality assurance regimen,” he said. Anand and his team conducted studies to understand whether practicing yoga can help alleviate high-altitude-induced sickness faster. They found encouraging evidence among the trial patients and this may be useful for wellness in the military, he said.

Anand, who also edits the journal ‘Annals of Neuroscience’, however, said there was still a lack of molecular data that could prove several benefits of yoga. For this India needs professors of yoga and molecular biologists working together, he said.