The Science of Yoga

among other projects. Such inquiries are revealing true paths to a better future.
    In 2011, the Institutes began a new cycle of studies, despite increasingly tight budgets. They include yoga for cancer survivors, for adults who suffer persistent depression,and for elderly women at risk of cardiovascular disease.
    Opponents of federal research love to disparage yoga investigations as extravagant wastes of taxpayer money. In 2005, Human Events , a conservative journal, ridiculed yoga studies as symptomatic of the “bloated bureaucracy syndrome.” Such criticism is likely to grow in the years ahead as political battles heat up in Washington over how to reduce the federal budget deficit.
    It follows that the public funding of yoga research, without concerted advocacy, is unlikely to see significant increases anytime soon. Wherever you live—in the United States or elsewhere—it seems like a good time to write your representatives or take other steps to bring the merits of yoga studies to the attention of public officials. In 2011, the amount of money that the National Institutes of Health spent on yoga research amounted to about $7 million. That’s too small to qualify as even a drop in Washington’s bucket. It’s nearly invisible. A much larger investment seems wise, given that yoga’s demonstrated skills at disease prevention might result in savings of billions of dollars in traditional health-care costs. The outlay is highly leveraged, as actuaries like to say.
    As a society, we are learning that extended old age can mean extended pain and debilitation, with worn-out organs and crippling dementias turning the twilight years into tragedies. Yoga seems to hold out the promise of increasing not only our life spans but our health spans. It may be part of the answer to enhancing not just the quantity of life but its quality, to helping us remain healthy for a longer period of time, to making our last years more vital and productive. That promise seems like a wonderful topic for a serious program of research.
    The stakes go far beyond practicalities. One of the most interesting frontiers has little or nothing to do with expediency and everything to do with simple understanding.
    What if Paul had been able to do a few brain scans and other measurements while the Punjab yogi sat in his deathlike trance? What new science might have emerged? Is disanimate bliss a human birthright? Is the euphoric trance safe? Can it spiral into madness? Does it make you a better person? Can it improve how we treat one another?
    Science fiction with its portrayals of long space fights that feature coffinlike freezers and frozen astronauts may be passé. Perhaps human hibernation—as Pauldescribed it more than a century and a half ago—is the right way to go. Maybe future astronauts will slip into a Full Lotus when voyaging between the stars.
    We have yet to address scientifically—much less begin to unravel—such questions. At a minimum, a deeper understanding of yoga has humanitarian implications ranging from practical therapies for people caught in kundalini’s coils to psychoanalytic insights of a kind that Jung would have cherished.
    The public evidence suggests that yoga’s rather profound ability to slow the human metabolism can function like a match to ignite a sexual blaze. Often, the resulting state is feverish and the yogi animated (if not meditating or immobilized in the Punjab yogi’s kind of catalepsy). As noted in chapter 6, I call this reversal the yoga paradox. It has received no explicit attention to my knowledge from either yoga professionals or the world of biomedicine. Corby’s team at Stanford saw glimmers of the transformation. The main symptom is a radical change of homeostasis—the body’s metabolic equilibrium—from cool to hot. One of my hopes for this book is that it will prompt the scientific community to carefully study this and other aspects of yogic hypersexuality.
    The science of yoga has only just begun. In my judgment, the topic has such depth and resonance that the voyage of discovery will go on for centuries, perhaps millennia. What started with Paul and studies of respiratory physiology will spread to investigations ever more central to life and living, to questions of insight and ecstasy, of being and consciousness. Ultimately, the social understanding that follows in the wake of scientific discovery will address issues of human evolution and what we decide to become as a species.
    Even