The Science of Yoga

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 functionsdominated 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 likea 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