The Science of Yoga

so, as I mentioned in the prologue, it’s important to remember that science has no monopoly on the truth.
    As a science journalist, I have devoted my career to writing about science and trying to illuminate its findings and methods. Science is incredibly tough in practice despite its often gentle and glamorous image. By nature, it seeks to limit the role of faith, to make as few assumptions as possible, and to subject the information it gathers as well as its own tentative findings to withering doubt. A synonym for “science” is “organized skepticism.” The process can be intellectually brutal. The constructive side is that science, done right, also works to suspend judgment, to collect and test andverify before coming to firm conclusions. In theory, it can see without prejudice. That makes it a rare thing in the world of human institutions.
    But science—even at its best, even with its remarkable powers of discrimination and discovery—is nonetheless extraordinarily crude. It ignores much about reality to zero in on those aspects of nature that it can quantify and comprehend. What gets set aside can be considerable—the wonders of the Sistine Chapel, among other achievements. Science, for all its triumphs over the last four centuries, sometimes fails to see the obvious. It is blind to the individuality of a snowflake and the convulsions of the stock market, not to mention ethics. No equation is going to outdo Shakespeare.
    My book The Orcenter1e devoted its last chapter to sketching out the limitations of scientific knowledge. The arguments are philosophic in nature but come down to the great difficulty that science faces in trying to provide a comprehensive worldview.
    What I know with certainty is that science cannot address, much less answer, many of the most interesting questions in life. It’s one finger of a hand, as a wise man once said. I treasure the scientific method for its insights and discoveries, as well as for the wealth of comforts and social advances it has given us. But I question the value of scientism—the belief that science has authority over all other interpretations of life, including the philosophic and spiritual, moral and humanistic.
    So while the science of yoga may be demonstrably true—while its findings may be revelatory and may show popular declarations to be false or misleading—the field by nature fails utterly at producing a complete story. Many of yoga’s truths surely go beyond the truths of science.
    Yoga may see further, and its advanced practitioners, for all I know, may frolic in fields of consciousness and spirituality of which science knows nothing. Or maybe it’s all delusional nonsense. I have no idea.
    But even if the otherworldly view has merit, this book and the long studies of the scientific community show the bottom line. The transcendental bliss starts with the firing of neurons and neurotransmitters, with surges of hormones and brain waves.
    It’s the science of yoga.

Epilogue
    R un the clock forward a century or two. What is yoga like? It seems to me that, based on current trends, two very different outcomes are possible. Both revolve around science, otherwise known as the pursuit of systematized truth.
    In one scenario, the fog has thickened as competing groups and corporations vie for market share among the bewildered. The chains offer their styles while spiritual groups offer theirs, with experts from the various camps clashing over differing claims. Immortality is said to be in the offing. The disputes resemble the old disagreements of religion. But factionalism has soared. Whereas yoga in the late twentieth century began to splinter into scores of brands—all claiming unique and often contradictory virtues—now there are hundreds. Yet, for all the activity, yoga makes only a small contribution to global health care because most of the claims go unproven in the court of medical science. The general public sees yoga mainly as a cult that corporations seek to exploit.
    In the other scenario, yoga has gone mainstream and plays an important role in society. A comprehensive program of scientific study early in the twenty-first century produced a strong consensus on where yoga fails and where it succeeds. Colleges of yoga science now abound. Yoga doctors are accepted members of the establishment, their natural therapies often considered gentler and more reliable than pills. Yoga classes are taught by certified instructors whose training is as