The Science of Yoga

her muscles did in fact exhibit electrical spikes even when she tried to remain as calm and tranquil as possible. Later, after the woman learned to relax deeply, the waves vanished. And she found new strength and stability in her emotional life.
    As Jacobson studied one way of letting go, other means of calming the mind and refreshing the spirit came under investigation. One scientist looked at controlled breathing and did so through the lens of one of the most fashionable emerging fields of the day, psychology.
    Kovoor T. Behanan was born andraised in India. In 1923, he graduated from the University of Calcutta with distinction. He traveled to the United States and Yale, first to study religion, then philosophy and psychology. In 1931, he won a fellowship to travel back to India and evaluate the psychology of yoga.
    Behanan did the reasonable thing. He journeyed to the world capital of yoga research—Gune’s ashram in the mountains south of Bombay. There he threw himself into learning yoga under Gune’s personal guidance. From April 1932 to March 1933, Behanan practiced every day, doing postures, breathing exercises, and concentration training. He then returned to Yale determined to do a series of scientific experiments that would explain his newfound joy.
    Behanan started in early 1935, after he had been practicing yoga for more than three years. He studied his own mental reactions, seeing the work as exploratory. In particular, he zeroed in on one of yoga’s easiest kinds of breath control.
    Ujjayi Pranayama is known as Victorious Breath. Despite its intimidating name, the style involves simply breathing in and out with great deliberation, the glottis in the throat slightly contracted so the breath makes a hissing sound, like the soft roar of the ocean. Behanan would inhale slowly through both nostrils. After filling his lungs to the brim, he would hold the breath for the same length of time as the inhalation, and then exhale steadily for the same duration.
    Resting adults breathe anywhere from ten to twenty times a minute. Ujjayi is much slower. Behanan reports that he did the exercise at a rate of twenty-eight cycles in twenty-two minutes, or a little more than one per minute. In other words, he breathed about ten times slower than a resting adult. It was the kind of slowdown that Paul had described in his book A Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy.
    The psychological testing went on for thirty-six days. Behanan would do the evaluations before and after the breathing exercises to see how they changed his state of mind. The tests consisted of adding numbers, breaking codes, identifying colors, doing puzzles, and performing little exercises in physical coordination.
    He published his results in a 1937 book, Yoga: A Scientific Evaluation. He now had a doctorate from Yale, as the title page noted prominently, and the book was wellreceived. Life ran a formal portrait of Behanan in coat and tie and photographs of half-naked students upending themselves in tricky poses. The feature was spread over two pages. Time ran a glowing review. It called him handsome, thirty-five, and a first-class poker player.
    Behanan’s central finding turned out to be a lucid confirmation of Jacobson’s surmise about deep relaxation causing a drop in mental activity. Across the board, the breathing exercise brought about what Behanan called “a retardation of mental functions.” The finding, he conceded, might leave readers a little surprised.
    All the tests took him longer to complete, up to twenty-six seconds longer. The yoga breathing had its greatest impact—and produced the greatest lag—on his math abilities.
    His findings, Behanan noted, contradicted the popular image of yoga as a magic elixir that endowed its practitioners with superhuman powers. But he hailed the mental slowing as important because of its repercussions for mood. The breathing exercise, Behanan reported, brought about a state of deep relaxation that produced “an extremely pleasant feeling of quietude.” The inner pleasure became even greater if he added concentration exercises. “I would like to prolong it indefinitely,” he wrote of the floating state, “if it were in my power to do so.”
    The evidence indicated that the mental slowing was temporary and Behanan held out the possibility that the period of refreshment might actually produce an overall improvement in “our normal intellectual faculties.”
    At the book’s end, Behanan summarized his own