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Authors: William J Broad
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philosophy). Today, Hatha and its offspring are the most widely practiced forms of yoga on the planet, having produced scores of variations that range from local styles in most every country to such ubiquitous global brands as Iyengar and Ashtanga.
My enthusiasm for gyms and swimming also gave me a reasonable perspective on how yoga differs from regular exercise. In general (with exceptions we’ll study closely), it goes slow rather than fast, emphasizing static postures and fluidmotions rather than the rapid, forceful repetitions of, say, spinning or running. Its low-impact nature puts less strain on the body than traditional sports, increasing its appeal for young people as well as aging boomers. In terms of physiology, it takes a minimalist approach to burning calories, contracting muscles, and stressing the body’s cardiovascular system. Perhaps most distinctively, it places great emphasis on controlling the breath and fostering an inner awareness of body position. Advanced yoga, in turn, goes further to encourage concentration on subtle energy flows. Overall, compared to sports and other forms of Western exercise, yoga draws the attention inward.
I began examining the yogic literature with a sense of wariness. Long ago, while working at the University of Wisconsin on a study of respiratory physiology, I came across a flat contradiction to one of modern yoga’s central tenets—that fast breathing floods the body and brain with revitalizing oxygen. In contrast, a textbook I was reading at the time said the pace of human respiration “can drop to one-half or rise to over one hundred times normal without appreciably influencing the amount of blood oxygenated.” I see now that, in 1975, I underlined that passage quite heavily.
Unfortunately, my survey lived up to my low expectations. Some books and authors shone brightly. (See Further Reading for a list.) But on the whole, I found the literature dull with dreaminess, assertions with no references, and a surprising number of obvious untruths. I wanted tips for tracking down good science but instead got a muddle. The writing, old and new, turned out to run toward the curiously dogmatic and, at best, to contain only a smattering of science. Much of it was similar to what Richard Feynman, a founder of modern physics, disparaged as cargo-cult science—that is, material that appears scientific but lacks factual integrity.
By contrast, my plunge into the scientific literature left me heartened. Federal officials at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, run a wonderful electronic library of global medical reports known as PubMed, short for Public Medicine. It showed that scientists had written nearly one thousand papers related to yoga—the number rising in the early 1970s and soaring in recent years, with reports added every few days. The studies ranged from the flaky and superficial to the probing and rigorous. The authors included researchers at Princeton and Duke, Harvard and Columbia. Moreover,the field had gone global. Scientists in Sweden and Hong Kong were publishing serious papers.
But the closer I looked, the more I judged this body of information to be rather limited. Some general topics had been covered fairly well—for instance, how yoga can relax and heal. But many others were ignored, and much of the published science turned out to be superficial. For instance, studies for the approval of a new drug can require the participation of hundreds or even thousands of human subjects, the large numbers increasing the reliability of the findings. In contrast, many yoga investigations had fewer than a dozen participants. Some featured just one individual.
The superficiality turned out to have fairly obvious roots. Research on yoga was often a hobby or a sideline. It had no big corporate sponsors (there being no hope of discoveries that could lead to expensive pills or medical devices) and relatively little financial support from governments.
My enthusiasm for gyms and swimming also gave me a reasonable perspective on how yoga differs from regular exercise. In general (with exceptions we’ll study closely), it goes slow rather than fast, emphasizing static postures and fluidmotions rather than the rapid, forceful repetitions of, say, spinning or running. Its low-impact nature puts less strain on the body than traditional sports, increasing its appeal for young people as well as aging boomers. In terms of physiology, it takes a minimalist approach to burning calories, contracting muscles, and stressing the body’s cardiovascular system. Perhaps most distinctively, it places great emphasis on controlling the breath and fostering an inner awareness of body position. Advanced yoga, in turn, goes further to encourage concentration on subtle energy flows. Overall, compared to sports and other forms of Western exercise, yoga draws the attention inward.
I began examining the yogic literature with a sense of wariness. Long ago, while working at the University of Wisconsin on a study of respiratory physiology, I came across a flat contradiction to one of modern yoga’s central tenets—that fast breathing floods the body and brain with revitalizing oxygen. In contrast, a textbook I was reading at the time said the pace of human respiration “can drop to one-half or rise to over one hundred times normal without appreciably influencing the amount of blood oxygenated.” I see now that, in 1975, I underlined that passage quite heavily.
Unfortunately, my survey lived up to my low expectations. Some books and authors shone brightly. (See Further Reading for a list.) But on the whole, I found the literature dull with dreaminess, assertions with no references, and a surprising number of obvious untruths. I wanted tips for tracking down good science but instead got a muddle. The writing, old and new, turned out to run toward the curiously dogmatic and, at best, to contain only a smattering of science. Much of it was similar to what Richard Feynman, a founder of modern physics, disparaged as cargo-cult science—that is, material that appears scientific but lacks factual integrity.
By contrast, my plunge into the scientific literature left me heartened. Federal officials at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, run a wonderful electronic library of global medical reports known as PubMed, short for Public Medicine. It showed that scientists had written nearly one thousand papers related to yoga—the number rising in the early 1970s and soaring in recent years, with reports added every few days. The studies ranged from the flaky and superficial to the probing and rigorous. The authors included researchers at Princeton and Duke, Harvard and Columbia. Moreover,the field had gone global. Scientists in Sweden and Hong Kong were publishing serious papers.
But the closer I looked, the more I judged this body of information to be rather limited. Some general topics had been covered fairly well—for instance, how yoga can relax and heal. But many others were ignored, and much of the published science turned out to be superficial. For instance, studies for the approval of a new drug can require the participation of hundreds or even thousands of human subjects, the large numbers increasing the reliability of the findings. In contrast, many yoga investigations had fewer than a dozen participants. Some featured just one individual.
The superficiality turned out to have fairly obvious roots. Research on yoga was often a hobby or a sideline. It had no big corporate sponsors (there being no hope of discoveries that could lead to expensive pills or medical devices) and relatively little financial support from governments.
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