The Science of Yoga

miraculous claims.
1962
Scientists at Gune’s ashram find that yogis in an airtight pit can withstand live burial for hours rather than weeks.
1965
B. K. S. Iyengar authors Light on Yoga , which becomes a global bestseller. It features the language of medicine and promotes yoga as aligned with science.
1969
Astronauts land on the moon.
1970
In a laboratory, Swami Rama demonstrates mental control over blood flowing through his palm, warming and cooling different sides.
1972
W. Ritchie Russell, a British scientist and physician, warns that pronounced bending of the neck in yoga can result in strokes and crippling disabilities.
1973
Scientists report the first of what turn out to be a number of gruesome yoga strokes.
1974
Scientists at Benares Hindu University find that yoga prompts rises in testosterone—the first evidence from a clinical laboratory that yoga can enhance sexuality.
1975
Herbert Benson, a physician at Harvard, reports that meditators can lower their respiratory rate, heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen consumption. He calls the relaxedstate hypometabolism .
1976
Lee Sannella, a San Francisco psychiatrist, authors a book on kundalini arousal and concludes from case studies that it promotes spiritual uplift rather than psychosis.
1976
Sannella opens the Kundalini Crisis Clinic.
1977
Voyager 1 blasts off for Jupiter and Saturn.
1978
Scientists at Stanford University report that people in Tantric meditation undergo a variety of physiologic arousals—the reverse of yoga’s usual promotion of calm serenity.
1983
Swedish scientists find that advanced yogis who breathe fast can do so without light-headedness or passing out.
1985
Czech scientists report that Tantric poses can generate surges of brain waves similar to those of lovers.
1987
The Spiritual Emergency Network finds that the typical caller to its help line is a woman with questions about kundalini.
1991
The Cold War ends.
1992
Scientists at Rutgers report that some women can think themselves into states of sexual ecstasy—an ability known clinically as spontaneous orgasm and popularly as thinking off .
1998
The National Institutes of Health begins spending public funds on yoga research, starting a wave that builds slowly in size to address such conditions as diabetes, arthritis, insomnia, depression, and chronic pain.
2001
Italian scientists report that repeating a mantra reduces respiration by about half, calming the mind.
2001
A research team at the University of California at Davis finds that yoga boosts aerobic conditioning and meets the “current recommendations to improve physical fitness and health”—a claim the sports establishment doubts and eventually seeks to disprove.
2002
Scientists at the University of British Columbia report that fastbreathing can result in sexual arousal.
2002
The Consumer Product Safety Commission detects a sharp rise in yoga injuries.
2003
Yogani, an American Tantric, debuts on the Internet and draws thousands to his methods of kundalini arousal.
2004
Yogani calls kundalini a code word for sex.
2004
Russian scientists find that the Cobra position causes blood levels of testosterone to rise.
2004
Medical doctors report that fast yoga breathing ruptured a woman’s lung.
2005
Analysts at the University of Virginia review seventy studies and find that yoga promotes cardiovascular health.
2006
Indian scientists report that yoga cuts the basal metabolic rate by 13 percent, threatening students with “weight gain and fat deposition.” The finding contradicts a tradition of slenderizing claims.
2006
Graduates of More University in California report an experiment in which a woman stayed in an orgasmic state for eleven hours.
2007
Scientists at Columbia and Long Island universities report that vigorous yoga fails to meet the minimum aerobic recommendations of medical and government groups.
2007
A team at Boston and Harvard universities find that the brains of yoga practitioners exhibit rises in a neurotransmitter that acts as an antidepressant.
2008
A team based at the University of California at San Francisco finds that yoga increases the production of telomerase, an enzyme linked to cellular longevity.
2009
The discovery of telomerase and its role in the human body wins a Nobel Prize.
2009
Investigators at the University of Pennsylvaniareport that yoga can reduce hypertension and its precursors—factors linked to stroke and cardiovascular disease.
2009
Scientists in Philadelphia report that yoga activates the