The Science of Yoga

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 reaction to his newfound discipline. Yoga, he said, had remade him.
    Before, he had frequent headaches, felt run down, and lacked what he called pep. But his days at the ashram gave him new energy and “emotional stability.” Behanan saw the same in his ashram colleagues.
    “They were the happiest personalities that I have known,” he recalled. “Their serenity was contagious.”
    If only he had stopped there. In his book, Behanan went on to describe experiments he had done at Yale in respiratory physiology (a very different field with very different methods and measurement techniques that in many respects are more difficult). He reported that Ujjayi caused a spike in oxygen consumption—more than any other breathing style that he investigated. To allappearances, the oxygen boost seemed to be the secret of yoga serenity.
    But it was only the myth, yet again. Behanan had left India before Gune cast doubt on the popular doctrine of the surges, and the research of the Yale investigator proved to be flawed.
    Unfortunately, his false report added to the unshakable durability of the oxygen myth, which still haunts popular yoga. And his