The Science of Yoga

Tantric meditation undergo a variety of physiologic arousals—the reverse of yoga’s usual promotion of calm serenity.
1983
Swedish scientists find that advanced yogis who breathe fast can do so without light-headedness or passing out.
1985
Czech scientists report that Tantric poses can generate surges of brain waves similar to those of lovers.
1987
The Spiritual Emergency Network finds that the typical caller to its help line is a woman with questions about kundalini.
1991
The Cold War ends.
1992
Scientists at Rutgers report that some women can think themselves into states of sexual ecstasy—an ability known clinically as spontaneous orgasm and popularly as thinking off .
1998
The National Institutes of Health begins spending public funds on yoga research, starting a wave that builds slowly in size to address such conditions as diabetes, arthritis, insomnia, depression, and chronic pain.
2001
Italian scientists report that repeating a mantra reduces respiration by about half, calming the mind.
2001
A research team at the University of California at Davis finds that yoga boosts aerobic conditioning and meets the “current recommendations to improve physical fitness and health”—a claim the sports establishment doubts and eventually seeks to disprove.
2002
Scientists at the University of British Columbia report that fastbreathing can result in sexual arousal.
2002
The Consumer Product Safety Commission detects a sharp rise in yoga injuries.
2003
Yogani, an American Tantric, debuts on the Internet and draws thousands to his methods of kundalini arousal.
2004
Yogani calls kundalini a code word for sex.
2004
Russian scientists find that the Cobra position causes blood levels of testosterone to rise.
2004
Medical doctors report that fast yoga breathing ruptured a woman’s lung.
2005
Analysts at the University of Virginia review seventy studies and find that yoga promotes cardiovascular health.
2006
Indian scientists report that yoga cuts the basal metabolic rate by 13 percent, threatening students with “weight gain and fat deposition.” The finding contradicts a tradition of slenderizing claims.
2006
Graduates of More University in California report an experiment in which a woman stayed in an orgasmic state for eleven hours.
2007
Scientists at Columbia and Long Island universities report that vigorous yoga fails to meet the minimum aerobic recommendations of medical and government groups.
2007
A team at Boston and Harvard universities find that the brains of yoga practitioners exhibit rises in a neurotransmitter that acts as an antidepressant.
2008
A team based at the University of California at San Francisco finds that yoga increases the production of telomerase, an enzyme linked to cellular longevity.
2009
The discovery of telomerase and its role in the human body wins a Nobel Prize.
2009
Investigators at the University of Pennsylvaniareport that yoga can reduce hypertension and its precursors—factors linked to stroke and cardiovascular disease.
2009
Scientists in Philadelphia report that yoga activates the right brain—the side that governs creativity.
2009
A team at the University of British Columbia shows that fast breathing can heighten sexual arousal among healthy women as well as those with diminished sex drives.
2010
Analysts at the University of Maryland examine more than eighty studies and find that yoga equals or surpasses exercise in reducing stress, improving balance, diminishing fatigue, decreasing anxiety, lifting moods, and improving sleep.
2010
Indian scientists report that men and women who take up yoga enjoy wide improvements in their sex lives, including better desire, arousal, satisfaction, and emotional closeness with partners.
2011
Physicians in Taiwan find that yoga lessens the incidence of spinal deterioration.
2011
Indian scientists report that yoga can ease trauma from rheumatoid arthritis, a painful inflammation of the joints that afflicts millions of people.
2011
Connecticut researchers find that elderly women who take up yoga improve their sense of balance.

Chronology
    BCE
c. 2500
Clay seals of the Indus Valley civilization show figuresin poses that some scholars consider the earliest known precursors of yoga. The feet of the sitting figures are tucked beneath the torso, near the genitals. The depicted individuals are seen as seeking inner heat for magic power.
438
Athens dedicates the Parthenon.
    CE
c. 400
Patanjali writes Yoga Sutras , a series of aphorisms on enlightenment.