2022 Neuroscience and Yoga Online Conference Fun Experiment Results

Okay. Hello everyone. We'll get started with the experiment results. I just have to say I'm so happy everyone is here. I think we have some really interesting findings to talk about, and I know that the people here are all very inquisitive and we'll have a lot of questions and it'll be a good discussion. So that's all that matters.

All right.

All right. So just a quick few things to say. The goal of sharing these results is really to stimulate excitement and share neuroscience and yoga with everyone. I hope you'll walk away with a better understanding of both the theory and the practical behind all of this, and that you'll be inspired to support and participate in scientific research on yoga. And yeah, it's just really exciting to be able to share these results. For the people who are watching later, I'm sorry the time didn't work out, but please always feel free to write in comments and ask all your questions. For everyone who's here in person, I'll have opportunities for questions at the end of each section. So we're going to have 3 sections today. Yoga and child development, yoga and brain aging, and yoga and addiction. And all of the experiments were conducted before and after yoga classes. During our Neuroscience and Yoga online conference. So let's begin with some disclaimers. So nothing is perfect, and at the same time, everything is perfect. But so these studies were really conducted under suboptimal conditions. They were conducted with no control. So everyone who participated received the yoga intervention. They were conducted in a Real-world setting across so many time zones. Maybe there was some glitchy internet and there were just so many variables that we couldn't control for. Another thing to note is that all of our conclusions you should take with some skepticism because our sample numbers were quite small. They ranged from 4 to 8 per experiment that we were fully able to use. And another important thing to bear in mind is that for certain tests, especially because a lot, a lot of our tests are behavioral and cognitive, participants were more familiar with them the second time they took them. And this definitely impacts results. We had a strategy to try to limit this impact. So we had people practice before doing the real task, and that hopefully reduces some of the practice effect. But ideally we would have a control group to truly control for this. And another thing to note is that everyone who participated in these experiments, they're excited about yoga and neuroscience. And for some of the more subjective measurements, that definitely leads people to either consciously or subconsciously modify their answers after yoga. So those are the disclaimers to be aware of as we go through all of these results. And now some very generous thank yous. So Rukmini Roy, top left, Claire Sun, top right, Katerina Lebel, bottom left, and Jen Peresini, bottom right. Huge, huge thank you to this team of people who contributed to designing the experiments and implementing them and analyzing them. And it's a huge undertaking. So yeah, it's very, very appreciated by all of us. Okay. So the outline for today. For yoga and child development, we'll focus on 2 experiments that have to do with stress regulation. That is the perceived stress scale and executive function, the go/no-go task. For yoga and brain aging, we'll focus on attention, really visual attention and positive and negative affect. And these will be the concentration grid task and the positive and negative affect score, otherwise known as PANSS. For yoga and addiction, we have 2 tasks, the temporal discounting and the Iowa gambling task. And we'll go over what each of these means as we go through the different sections. But these are the 3 things up on the plate. And before we launch into yoga and child development, I just want to remind everyone that neuroscience is a huge field. That spans every level of science. So from the very smallest molecules and genes up to the very biggest behaviors and societies and cognition. So we're really focusing on what we can measure during a conference like this, and that tends to be more behavioral and cognitive outcomes. But remember that there's a lot more going on behind all of that circuits, neurons, synapses, molecules, genes, et cetera. I'll touch on some of the research, but we don't have any data on those other parts. And of course, those other parts are very interesting too. Okay. Any questions before we start with yoga and child development?

Okay.

Let's do it. So for the Yoga and Child Development Day this year, the presentations focused on topics like self-regulation, emotional skills, attention, ADHD. And all of these are very important for pediatric populations as they go through school and personally develop. So for the experiments corresponding to this topic, we focused on executive function and stress regulation. And that's a really important component of self-regulation and executive function. So I want to give an overview of stress physiology. Before we get into the experiment results, just so that there's some background for this. Can anyone define stress for me? Is it like a mental or emotional strain? Or yeah, strain. Yeah, I think that definitely is a component of how all of us experience stress. I think the best definition of stress that I've seen is stress is all about deploying resources. So sometimes there's actually productive stress, like it feels good, it's not fully straining. And that kind of stress is a mobilization of resources that allows us to accomplish a task. And so stress is a brain-determined process that affects the whole body. And I really like this summary of it that it's Deploying resources, it's brain determined, and it affects the whole body. And there are different types of stressors. So if you look at the top of this diagram, on the left you see psychological stressors and on the right physical. So physical stressors are things like infections, injuries, hunger, whereas psychological are more like deadlines, financial strain, and grief. And this is kind of these 2 big arrows that feed into the stress response are probably the most interesting, but also the least understood areas of the stress system. And that's how the brain identifies a stimulus as a stressor. So it takes whatever we're perceiving and, and working with and determines if this stressful or not, how many resources should I mobilize for this or not? And it signals to the body via 2 main pathways to accomplish this. On the left, you see the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. And on the right, the sympathetic adrenal medullary axis. This is very well studied, and that's why it's so prominent on this graph. There's been a ton of research on these 2 systems, and it's easy to measure their output. So you see mediators here. There are many mediators in the blood having to do with heart rate, electrophysiologic measures that you can really tease apart. What are the components of the stress response that are activated? And a quick summary is that the sympathetic adrenal medullary system on the right is fast. It works through nerves, whereas on the left, the HPA axis is slow because it works through the blood. So chemicals dissolve into the blood and then get distributed around the body. And once these mediators are activated, they then have effects everywhere. So they increase energy metabolism in certain places, especially like your muscles, and decrease it in other places like your digestion or your reproductive system. And then in the brain, they have a ton of effects. So they change the way genes are expressed. They change the sensitivity of neurons to learning and to stimuli, and they decrease reaction time. So they make you faster. So it has a lot of effects across the whole brain. And really the goal of this is adaptation so that you can then adapt to the stress and not be destroyed. The whole goal is to survive. And just so you know, the, I'm showing all of these images. They all come from really wonderful review papers. And at the end, I'll show a reference slide. So if anyone wants to read the papers that these are from, you can find them there. And they're really, really good. Just be prepared to dedicate an hour or 2 to reading them because they're very comprehensive. Okay. So one of the areas of the brain that's really impacted by stress is the hippocampus. And I'm sure people here remember the hippocampus from the conference. And for those who weren't at the conference and are still learning about neuroscience, the hippocampus is the part of the brain that helps with episodic memory. And the hippocampus is extremely well studied with stress. And what's so interesting about it is that the timing matters. So on top for Figure A, we see an example where learning and stress are timed together. And what happens is you dedicate attention resources to the learning task, and then the surge in, in, in this case it says corticosterone, that's cortisol in rodents. So in us it would be cortisol. And when the cortisol surge happens during consolidation, You suppress other information so that you can learn the task better. So learning and stress at the same time improved memory. Whereas for Figure B, you see that there's stress before the learning task, and now the cortisol surge is occurring later. It's occurring during the attentive process of the learning task, and now you're suppressing information and synchronization of neurons before consolidation, and you actually interrupt learning. So this is a really interesting feature of how the hippocampus responds to the stress system. And increased mistimed stress signaling over a long period of time actually reduces hippocampal function across every level of neuroscience. So we can see it chemically with changes in signaling molecules like brain-derived neurotrophic factor. You can see it anatomically. So like on slides, if you look at stressed hippocampi, they actually have less or fewer dendrites. And so they're less connected. You can also see smaller hippocampi on MRIs and behaviorally worse performance in memory tasks. So every level of neuroscience really demonstrates consistent evidence of how stress affects learning. And another way that the timing of stress matters is when in your life stressors are experienced. So early on in childhood, there are these periods that if you remember, Dr. Anderson spoke about critical periods. So these are as you are developing specific skills like language, vision function, motor skills. And if you deliver very significant stressors during those periods, and these are, you know, stressors like child abuse or neglect or significant physical stressors like hunger, those again can interrupt and this time really permanently change learning. So they change or really disrupt the development of neural systems. They reprogram stress and immune regulatory systems and result in lifelong epigenetic changes. And a lot of research right now is showing that this puts people at risk for future diseases like cognitive decline, psychopathology, and a lot of psychosocial problems like unemployment and incarceration and other illnesses too that aren't even pictured here. So like cardiovascular disease, asthma, cancer, all of those are increased with childhood stress. So what we really focused on during the conference was, wouldn't it be great if there was a tool? That helps temper the stress response and especially in children while they're in critical periods. Well, before we jump into, this is the last slide before we really jump into what we did. I know everyone is like, let's get to the data. So this is a very detailed slide that just gives you a sense of how complicated the stress network is in the brain. So this is That top part of this picture where stressors are determined. So these are the parts of the brain interacting and talking to each other to figure out, is this a stressor? Do I need to mobilize resources or not? And many people will dedicate their entire career just to one line of this diagram. Like that's how much work has gone into figuring all of this out. And again, the main takeaway. is that this network is very complicated. We do not understand it fully, but some things that we do know are that the prefrontal cortex plays a very significant role in regulating the other parts of this network, allowing for goal-oriented reasoning to regulate the stress response. And I think a really important gathering evidence hypothesis is that yoga affects these networks of how we determine what is stressful and what isn't. And there's a component of executive function in this self-regulation. And of course, other things affect this network too, not just yoga, but obviously we're focusing on yoga. So now we can go over the 2 experimental techniques. So the first is a subjective validated scale that measures someone's experience of stress over the past month. And this is called the Perceived Stress Scale. It ranges from 0 to 40 with 0 being no stress and 40 being very high stress. And then the go/no-go task is a validated measure of executive function and really a specific part of executive function called response inhibition. And this is the ability to have a motor response only with a certain stimulus. And so. Just to make this very intuitive for you, this is a go/no-go task. So when you see a green light, you know to go. When you see a red light, you know to not go. So it's very easy when something's already been ingrained in us to follow the instructions and do no-go, but I'm going to give you a little go/no-go task right now.

Okay.

So the rules are, I want you to clap your hands anytime you see a dog, but not a cat.

Okay.

Okay, so I did it fast, and you can see how this can be quite challenging, right? And when you don't have a lot of time to think about it and you're trying to program your motor system to respond to certain stimuli, it can be quite challenging. So that's really what a go/no-go task Is like. So we're going to go over some prior results that have looked at this. So I'm hiding half of the graph right now. We're going to look at one part of this at a time. So this was a study that looked at how stress affected performance on the go/no-go task. And what they did is participants were assigned to 4 different things. So they were assigned To a rest condition or a stress condition. And I'm going to tell you the other 2 in a little bit, but you can see those 2 here. So the gray bar is the rest condition and the white bar is the stress condition. And to stress them out, they basically made them like stand up and give a speech in front of people, which is like pretty mean. And so the, what you can see very clearly is that performance Is worse in the stress condition, the white bars. They took longer to perform on the go/no-go task. So what they did in the other group is they trained them in regulating their stress response. And what you see here is stress did not have that effect, right? So there is the possibility to regulate the stress response and prevent performance deficit. From stressors. Again, this really has to do with the prefrontal cortex. I'm just, I love this image of the prefrontal cortex. It shows beautifully where it's located and the different components of it. And the prefrontal cortex is what regulates the stress response in order to do this. So our experimental design was we had a go/no-go task, a perceived stress scale. So that's GNG-1 and PSS-1. Followed by a 1-hour yoga intervention. And then we subsequently repeated the go/no-go task and the perceived stress scale. And we had a few hypotheses from this. First, we predicted that perceived stress scale 2 will be lower than perceived stress scale 1 because yoga will reduce the identification and experience of stimuli as stressors. 2, that the reaction time on go/no-go task 2 will be lower than on go/no-go task. One, because yoga reduces the effects of stress on this task. And third, that changes in Go-No-Go task performance will correlate with changes in perceived stress scale because the stress is really what is primarily affecting the Go-No-Go task. So what did we find? So I'll start with hypothesis number 1. This is the perceived stress score before and after yoga. We had 8 participants who completed this. And after yoga, participants trended but did not significantly have a less perceived stress scale score. You can see that there's a lot of variability here. And so when we do the analysis, we're actually comparing within an individual. So each individual, how did their stress score change? And that's why this p-value suggests that there's an 18% chance that these results are due to chance. Which is pretty close to trend. So we'll continue monitoring in future studies how perceived stress score changes. But I will tell you that the literature very reliably demonstrates that yoga and mindfulness interventions reduce the perceived stress scale score.

Okay.

And another thing to note is that the perceived stress scale asks about stress over the last month. So to see any change after a 60-minute yoga class is pretty impressive because it's changing how people perceive their stress over a month, like the previous month of their life in just 60 minutes. Okay. So now hypothesis 2, going on to the go/no-go task. What we see is that the main finding is that the average reaction time decreased, and this was a significant difference. With only 4 people, there was only a 2% chance that this difference was the result of serendipity, that it wasn't an effect of the intervention. And what we can say from this is that there was a trend towards their slowest reaction time improving, fastest did not change, and average significantly improved. Okay, so now the most interesting finding. Okay. So this is hypothesis 3, and this is the correlation of the performance on the go/no-go task with perceived stress scores. And on the left is before yoga, and on the right is after yoga. And so we can see on the left that as perceived stress score is increasing, The duration of the slowest trial is increasing. So participants who had more stress were slower on their slowest trial. Of course, there are only 4 people. So anytime you're interpreting a correlation with 4 people, you have to be very careful. But this number right here tells you what percent of the data is explained by the perceived stress score, and it's about 50%. 53%, which is pretty impressive for a study like this. Any behavioral intervention, it's rare to see numbers quite that high. And what's even more interesting to me is it's one thing to see this before yoga, but then after yoga, there's no relationship between perceived stress scores and slowest trial duration. And what that really suggests is that yoga prevented stress From affecting performance. So after yoga, stress did not affect performance, whereas before yoga it did. And that is a very interesting finding. So just to summarize the conclusions, we hypothesized that perceived stress score 2 will be lower than perceived stress score 1, and we did find that. It was a trend, so it was not statistically significant, but I still think it was meaningful in the sense that To see any difference at all was interesting that you could see that with only 8 people and that it was asking about the previous month. And then hypothesis 2, that reaction time on Go-No-Go task 2 will be lower than on Go-No-Go task 1. We saw this as well. Of course, we do have to be cautious because this is an area where practice effects are going to have a very significant contribution. But going over hypothesis 3, I think that the correlation that we saw really suggests that there was at least some effect of yoga on the go/no-go task, that it wasn't just practice effects, because otherwise you wouldn't expect the relationship that we saw with the stress response. So those are our findings from the Yoga and Child Development Day. What questions does everyone have?

Hi, Jonathan.

I was a little bit late. And to be honest, I haven't still seen the, well, the interview you had about, about the child. But I wonder, how do we measure child stress? And do they even know what stress is? Or what is, what are the tips you gave the kids to identify stress? So this was all done in adults, right? So we didn't have any kids in the conference, and I think the ages were between like 20 and 60. So for, you're bringing up a really good point that I should have mentioned, which is that we're, we're basically extrapolating. We're saying we see these effects in adults, so we expect them in children too. There are measures of childhood stress and children can complete a perceived stress scale. At, at the point that they can read and answer questions like this, like maybe above age 8, they would definitely be able to answer this scale. But there are other measures as well as stress, even in infants. They can measure like skin conductance and, and other things. Short answer to the question is we are extrapolating and it's really based on an adult population that we're saying yoga affects stress, which then affects executive function. which then we assume would also be the case for children. And that's limited by our population, which was conference attendees. Yeah.

Hi, John. Thank you so much for that presentation. I really enjoyed it.

Okay. And there's more to come. Oh, okay.

I see. I see. So I just have a quick question. I'm just wondering, When you were saying yoga, and I think one of the instances you said yoga and mindfulness, I was just wondering what kind of yoga, what happened during the yoga process. And of course, we know yoga has a lot of benefits, and there are so many different types of yoga. And then when you add mindfulness to it, it's an entire process that exceeds the practice of yoga itself. So if you could just tell us a bit about what went through the yogic practice and what process of the yoga really affects this, that is reduction in stress a bit, and also the philosophy, maybe a little bit about that.

Yeah, this is the experimental design. The yoga intervention here was 60 minutes. It was the yoga class with Eddie Stern for these data, and The next 2 datasets that I'm gonna show you were the class with Sridharma Mitra and then with Taylor Hunt. The yoga intervention with Eddie was, it tended to be a, a slower class with postures held for a long time. There was breathing included, and there was also some discussion about yogic philosophy. And Eddie also talked a little bit about how yoga affects the nervous system, which obviously affects Um, how people perceive their experience of the yoga class. So to answer your question more broadly, just outside of our dataset, most of the research that examines how yoga affects the brain and the nervous system looks at complete yoga classes. So postures, breathing, meditation, and relaxation. The degree to which it includes all of those varies. So, you know, is it 30 minutes of each? Is it 60 minutes of postures and 5 minutes of the others? That all varies. But in general, including all of them is what is necessary to define something as a yoga intervention. There are some people who try to break down each individual component's effects. And that's one of our goals too in the future to really look at how does pranayama alone contribute? How does meditation alone contribute? And there are, of course, studies, mindfulness studies that look at different meditation interventions alone. The question of how much each of these is contributing right now is unanswerable, but we do think that they have a synergistic effect, meaning that putting them each together, if you did them each individually, they would have some effect. If you added that effect up, it would still be more by doing them all together. So the synergistic effect means that it's greater than the sum of the parts when you do all 4. I hope that answers your question.

Yeah.

Yeah, that does. And I'm really interested to know how the individual components would, uh, you know, benefit to produce stress. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks.

Of course. Any other questions before I go to the next section?

Just really quick, you might have mentioned this actually before I logged on, I'm not sure, but was there a component of the perceived stress scale that has them identify like what, I guess what the participants consider stress? You know what I mean? Because I feel like, I don't know if it's like the physical component of like the heavy breathing and stuff like that. Like what are they self- We're reflecting to see after the practice, is it the physical stress or the mental, like, overload?

So I'm going to pull up right now the perceived stress scale. Quite simple, but it's very well studied and validated. So it asks a total of 10 questions and they're scored from 0 to 4. So it's in the last month, how often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly or unable to control the important things in your life or felt nervous or stressed? Felt confident about your ability to handle personal problems, felt things were going your way, right? So they're basically asking positive and negative questions about more general things. It's not like stress from the yoga class. It's really just about your experience of stress overall in the past month.

I guess that kind of leads me to wonder what your initial thoughts are on this model, I guess, for studying in children just based on the fact that at a certain age you can't really reflect back 30 days.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so the perceived stress scale really only starts working for older children. Toddlers and infants would not be able to participate in this. Exactly. Have to use other measures of stress. Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

Of course. All right, so next section. So now we're going on to yoga and brain aging. This one's of particular interest to me cuz I feel like I'm aging rapidly. I don't know about you guys, but so brain aging, we really focused during the conference on chronic diseases. So like high blood pressure, diabetes, all of which have significant effects on the brain as it ages, and then how yoga affects those and kind of extrapolating. We also looked at how yoga affects mood during the conference and a little bit about how it affects cognition. So what we focused on in the experiments is mood and visual attention, and both of these tend to decline with age and particularly so in neurocognitive disorders. So for our measurement of mood, we used a validated subjective measure called the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. And this measures the tendency of an individual to experience stimuli positively and negatively. For visual attention, we measured the concentration grid task. This one is just a fun game, basically, where there's a gigantic grid and you have to find numbers in order. And I'll just show you what that looks like. It's a nightmare. Okay. So there are 100 numbers here and you have to Find 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and it's very hard, and click them in that order. So you can see how this really measures someone's visual attention and their working memory and also their vision function, which hopefully is good if they're doing this task. This shows the range of cognitive changes as people age. And so you can see on the x-axis here, age, so like in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and normal aging includes a decline in cognition, right? So that is considered normal. But where things become abnormal is when function starts to get impaired. And that's when you start crossing into an area called dementia, which everyone's heard of. These kinds of functional impairments have to do usually initially with things that are like higher order cognitive functions, dealing with your finances. Balancing your budget, making appointments and keeping them and showing up. And then as dementia progresses, it can begin to involve things like dressing yourself, feeding yourself, and that's really severe stages of dementia. So we're going to focus more on normal aging, you know, how yoga affects normal aging. And just to give a little more of a breakdown of How cognition changes with age, there are 2 types of cognition we need to pay attention to. One is fluid cognition and one is crystallized cognition. So fluid is where it's situation dependent. It's things like processing speed, attention, executive function. And you can see from this graph here, this one represents fluid cognition. There is a decline with age. So as people increase in age, Fluid cognition function decreases. And this is in contrast to crystallized attention cognition. This is things like factual knowledge, life experiences, and culture. So usually people retain these quite well. You can see there is no decline with age. And where do you think visual attention is? Is it a fluid cognitive task or is it a crystallized cognitive task? So it's going to be fluid. And so that's something that we would expect to decline with age. So someone's performance on something like a concentration grid task would decrease with age. And what's really interesting is other things affect visual attention too, besides age. One of them is mood. And you can see here, this was a really interesting study where they used music To manipulate people's mood. Um, and they measured their performance on a visual attention task before and after. So for some people, they got a positive musical experience. Others got a negative musical experience, and the third group got neutral. And what you see is that those who received a positive mood intervention had an increase in visual attention. Those who had a negative intervention had a decrease in visual attention. And neutral really had no changes. And the last piece of data from the literature to show you is that yoga has a profound impact on mood. So this was a 2-week yoga intervention. Ours obviously is much shorter than that. For this, for these data I'm about to show you, it was a 2.5-hour yoga intervention. So an hour and a half of postures and breathing and 60 minutes of yoga nidra and meditation. So this study that I'm showing on the screen right now, however, was not just one single intervention. It was 2 weeks of multiple classes, and they measured the positive and negative affect schedule before and after. And they found an increase in positive affect and a decrease in negative affect, meaning people saw things more positively and less negatively. And so we hypothesized the same results for our data as well. It's also important to note that with aging, mood tends to worsen as well. So people tend to have more negative affect and less positive affect. So that's why we chose the experiments I'm about to go through the design for, because we're really looking at number one, mood changes with yoga, number 2, visual attention changes with yoga, and number 3, whether they're associated. So our experimental design, very similar to before. So we had a concentration grid task and a positive and negative affect schedule, a yoga intervention, and then a repeat of the 2 measurements. Our hypotheses were that PANS-2 will show more positive affect and less negative affect than PANS-1 because yoga will improve mood. And we've seen that in the literature before. 2, that Concentration Grid 2 will take less time than Concentration Grid 1 because yoga will improve visual attention. And 3rd, that these improvements will correlate. So improvements in Concentration Grid testing will correlate with Positive and Negative Affect Schedule testing. And this is because mood may be one of the drivers of visual attention. As we saw. So what did we find? Well, this is the concentration task performance before and after yoga. We measured how long it took. And so before yoga, you can see it took on average about 450 seconds, and after yoga, about 410 seconds. So a 40-second improvement. Um, with 6 people, this was only a trend towards faster performance. And again, we always have to remember that there is definitely a practice effect contributing to this.

Yeah.

For mood. So on the left is the positive affect score, and on the right is the negative affect score. And we see a trend towards increased positive affect and a significantly decreased negative affect. So how did the associations play out? So this is where things get interesting. So I report 3 associations here. On the left is positive affect before yoga, and you can see that there's really no association between positive affect before yoga and concentration test duration. However, after yoga, we see a really strong relationship emerge where positive affect score, increased positive affect score was associated with faster times on the concentration test score. And this was an R-squared of 63, almost 64%, meaning 64% of the variation is explained by positive affect score. And what we also find is that the negative affect score really didn't contribute that much. So it was people's positive affect, like interpreting things as good, that improved their visual attention as opposed to not seeing things as bad. Which is interesting. And this only accounted for 16% of the variation. And you can see clearly, like, these dots do not move around this line, whereas these dots are really around this line. Okay. So just a summary of the conclusions. So for hypothesis 1, that positive affect will increase and negative affect will decrease, we saw a trend for the positive affect and a significantly decreased negative affect. And this suggests that there are broad effects of yoga on many mood networks in the brain, right? Because different mood networks have influence over positive affect and negative affect. We also hypothesized that concentration grid 2 will take less time than concentration grid 1 because yoga will improve visual attention. And we did see this trend again with the caveat that practice effects contribute to this. And finally, we hypothesized that there would be a correlation between mood and visual attention. And we saw that after yoga, there was an association, but not before yoga. And this really strengthens the argument that some of the improvement in reaction time was more than just practice effects, and it was actually related to yoga's effects on mood. Okay.

Questions? Okay. I'm gonna be the, the first one.

That's all you, Ben.

Yeah. Um, what is, can you, could you clarify one moment? Um, crystallized, um, liquid vision. Yeah.

What is that exactly? Yeah. So it's a distinction made in the literature. Okay. To try to parse out what parts are going to change with age. And fluid, some of the examples that you can think of are like processing speed, attention, and executive function. So these are things that like really depend on the situation that you're in. Like you can't prepare for them. They're not like, they're not like things that you improve on because of your life experiences. Whereas crystallized knowledge is skills that you've acquired, factual knowledges, even things like culture. You know how to cook your grandmother's favorite food, right? And that is something that is crystallized. You usually don't forget it with age. Whereas things that are more fluid are things like the ability to do mental math or the ability to stay awake during a long movie. I'm sorry, that's a funny example. But something like that.

Okay. So why is it fluid or crystallized? Because it moves.

That's the term that they've just applied to this in the literature. It's kind of a weird thing to call cognition crystallized. I agree. But I think what they're trying to suggest is it's cognition that just doesn't change. It's fixed. Whereas fluid is cognition that changes over time. Okay. Okay.

Okay.

That makes sense.

Yeah. I was thinking about, I was thinking more about like the fluid around the eyes and the, but the crystals around the eye.

Oh, nothing to do with it. It is not physiologically fluid or crystals.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay. Okay. Very interesting.

And I love the mood aspect that you explained. That was, that was, uh, very clarifying out there.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, sir.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

Any other questions?

Kind of following up on that one with crystallized cognition, I think, Jonathan, I had asked you one time about like mantras and memory and for people who suffer a severe like neurological disease or issue, but they're able to understand, like start singing or recognize voices with certain prayers or mantras. Is that because of crystallized cognition or is it a different—

That's really interesting. So I'm going to give an example of what you're talking about just so everyone else is on the same page. So like there's a very specific kind of stroke that damages the language production areas of the brain. And so people who experience this stroke are not able to produce language. They have a hard time talking. However, if you ask these same people to sing some of their favorite songs, they'll be able to do it. And it's a very interesting finding. And what it really suggests is that the networks that control singing your favorite songs are separate from the production of language. And so this gets at a really important thing. So crystallized cognition is really a model. It's like putting together a lot of thoughts, but each crystallized cognitive function is a separate network in the brain. They're not all just one thing. It's not like one part of the brain is crystallized cognition. And so when we are thinking about how we do things that we are like unexpected, like how is someone who has this injury or suffers this disease able to do this? It's really telling us about how our models are simplifications because like we think that it's all contained in one thing, but the brain is very distributed and these networks are extremely complicated and all over the place. And that's why we're learning from them all the time. And then going back to mantras, I imagine that people who practice mantras for a very long time, um, especially before they have some kind of neurological injury, they really do have separate networks for those mantras and bringing them out is probably similar to singing. And so, yes, I think we could call that almost in a way crystallized cognition, but I think it's different than the way those authors who originally dreamed it up.

Yeah.

thought about it. They were really thinking of it over age, not over neurologic injuries.

Okay.

Thank you so much. That's so interesting.

That was a great question. That was really interesting.

I wanted to ask about this brain. I mean, when you say the brain, are you also talking about the body in a way? Because the body also has its own way of responding. And it all, it is very, very, it's, it's a very sensitive, I mean, every part of the body actually. So when you, when you say brain, of course there's a physiological function of brain, but more in that very interconnected idea of neural networks throughout the body. How does the body act as the brain in your understanding? Or is there something else? Or, or am I missing something here?

Yeah, no, this is a very interesting question. And actually Dr. Raj Bandari, who presented at the conference, is really interested in this question too. So how the, how body functions affect brain functions. But going to, sorry, really far back, going to this, we see that there's a very dynamic interplay between brain And body systems. So the brain is really what is determining stressor, and then it is provoking responses in the body. And then those body responses feed back to the brain, right? So there's a lot of cross-communication between them. I cannot in a simple, succinct way summarize all of these interactions. And there are probably many that we don't know about, but really thinking about it in terms of yoga. Yeah, there's so many ways that the physical experiences of yoga affect the brain, and then also some of the more brain effects of yoga then affect the body. If you have specific things, maybe it'll trigger something, but that's all I have right now in my head of how complicated the answer to the question is.

What was the name of the researcher you mentioned?

Her name is Dr. Raj Pandhari. She is here in New York City at Mount Sinai. I just put her name in the chat and she's super awesome and she basically studies the stress response and how body physiology affects the brain processing of stress. I'm not doing her research justice. I'm having a hard time summarizing it well, but yeah, she's definitely someone who will be at future conferences. She's presented both years so far, and she and I have done a bunch of events together in the past. So more to come.

That's, that's very interesting. Actually, I saw one of your podcasts with Deepak Chopra, and I was just wondering If I can access any of these conversations between you and Rajiv and Daria, maybe?

Yeah.

And where?

Yeah. Yeah. Send me an email and I'll set you up.

Sure.

Sure.

Thanks.

Okay. So we're going to move on just for the sake of time. I'm sorry, I'm running late. I always run late. So we're going to move on to the data that have to do with yoga and addiction, and I will be quick. So for the Yoga and Addiction Day, we really focused during the presentations in the conference on how yoga affects executive function and, and control of impulsivity. So the experiments that we looked at have some validity, pretty good validity honestly, in measuring this impulsivity and the ability to make decisions that have to do with risk. So the first is called temporal discounting. And this is, I don't know why I find this so interesting, but I think it's crazy. So let's say there's no inflation. If I offered you $100 today or $100 in a month, it should be pretty equivalent, right? I mean, obviously everyone wants things sooner, but like it's the same value of the money. Yet you'll always choose $100 today. What if I offered you $100 today or $110 in a month? You're still kind of like, I'd rather just have the $100 today, or most people are. Yet it's obviously more valuable to wait a month. So this is called temporal discounting, where we view future things as less Valuable. And the way that we're going to calculate this, I'll show you an example of how the experiment works, but we're going to report this measure called ED50. And this is based on pharmacology research, but in temporal discounting, this is how many days does it take for money to lose 50% of its value? So if the ED50 is 100, that means in 100 days, $100 is worth $50 to you. Right? So if you were to choose between $100 today and $50 in 100 days, you would be ambivalent. You wouldn't be able to decide, but if it were more than $50, you would choose that. If it were less than $50, you would choose that. Okay. The second task is a very famous task called the Iowa Gambling Task. And this is a measure of risk calculation and decision-making where participants are choosing between high-risk, high-reward options. And low risk, low reward options. And this really kind of looks at people's risk tolerance and it's really much more than that. I'm simplifying it, but, so let's look at the temporal discounting task. You basically go through a series of questions. Do you want $100 tomorrow or $101 in 30 days? And then if you choose that you want $100 tomorrow, then it'll increase what the value in 30 days is. And it'll just keep doing this until it finds what is your break-even point. The Iowa Gambling Task is a little bit different. So you see 4 options and you basically are given $2,000, virtual dollars, not real, and you choose options and see your money go up and down based on that. And you're learning which options give you more reward and have how much risk, and you're just deciding what do you prefer. And this is just an example. So if someone clicked B, they could win $100, but they could also have to pay a fee of $250, right? And you can see how that's high reward. You could win $100, but it's also high risk. You could lose $250, right? So this is just a table of what our paradigm looked like. And this is very similar to the original Iowa Gambling Task. So the options A, B, C, and D are listed on top. And A and B are the same and C and D are the same. So for A and B, you could gain $100, but you could also lose $250 and you lost about 50% of the time. So if you chose A and B 10 times in a row, on average, you'd lose $250. C and D, on the other hand, were gaining $50 and losing $50. And you also lost about 50% of the time. And if you played C or D on average 10 trials, you would win $250. So rationally, we should all be playing C and B, right? That's how you're going to win. But A and B have this appeal of high risk, high reward, right? So what does the literature say about how this relates to addiction? Well, temporal discounting, so that ED50 measure, is actually really demonstrating to be a useful behavioral marker in addiction. It correlates with addiction severity and also predicts treatment outcome. And there are studies looking at neural network underpinnings of temporal discounting and addiction, as well as their genetic associations. And there really seems to be a lot of overlap between temporal discounting and addiction. The same is true of the Iowa Gambling Task and addiction. So a lot of studies showing relationship between them, specifically showing that Performance on the Iowa Gambling Task tends towards higher risk, high reward in patients who are struggling with addiction. So our experimental design, we did very similar to before. I think you're getting the theme of how we do this. So temporal discounting in Iowa Gambling before yoga and then repeated after yoga. And our hypotheses were that we will see a higher ED50. After yoga, and this is because, so to speak, yoga increases patience, or really it makes you value things in the future the same as you value them in the present. Less impulsivity might be another way to say that. In the Iowa Gambling Task, we expected to see lower risk seeking because we expected yoga again would reduce impulsivity. And we hypothesized that these changes would correlate. Because it should be the same underlying decision-making systems that are affected by yoga. So what did we find? So this is the ED50 before and after yoga. So for 7 people, there was a trend towards increase, and this was an increase of almost 100. So people are like 100 days more patient, so to speak, as a way to interpret these data. And then if we look at the Iowa Gambling Task, this is reaction time on the left. You can see people are much, much faster in the Iowa Gambling Task after. Again, practice effects contribute to this. And then lastly, risk tolerance. So we expected that risk tolerance would decrease, right? So in the beginning, before yoga, you can see people are 50/50, right? 50% of the time they're choosing A, 50— or sorry, A and B, and 50% of the time they're choosing C and D. But then after yoga, they're choosing A and B even more. They were pursuing riskier things. It was the opposite of what we expected. Of course, this was just a trend. It wasn't statistically significant. We only had 7 people. But it is contrary to our findings for sure. I mean, sorry, contrary to our expectations. And now the association. So what do you guys think about these associations? Does it look like ED50 and risk tolerance on the Iowa Gambling Task were associated? You can just do thumbs up, thumbs down. I see some thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up. So actually, this is a really good lesson in interpreting data. These are not associated. So the only reason that this one looks okay, like maybe a little bit associated, is because of this guy right here. Right? So that's what we call an outlier. So when interpretation is driven by outliers, you really have to be careful. If we were to take this out, there's absolutely no association among these.

Right?

So the way I would interpret these data, this is not a meaningful finding. There is no association between ED50 and risk tolerance, and it's unclear why this is. It may actually be that one yoga class isn't having much of an effect on this, or that they're working on different networks and different people have improvements in one and other people have improvements in the other. But whatever the reason, we did not see that association. So just to summarize our conclusions for ED50, we did see an increase after yoga. For risk tolerance, we saw more risk tolerance after yoga. And maybe I, I was wondering whether this could be due to changes in fear processing, right? So you're like less afraid of the consequences. So maybe you like pursue more risky things after yoga. I'm not sure. We would need to explore that a lot more. And then lastly, the correlation was not seen. Any questions? Okay. So just to mention, the analysis that we've done so far is not even close to like the full extent that you could analyze all of these data. So there's a lot of people when they do the Iowa Gambling Task, they'll look at their risk tolerance in the beginning versus the end. We did not do that. We just looked over the whole thing. Sometimes people will look at like What was their reaction time on trials where they pursued more risk versus their reaction time where they didn't pursue as much risk, right? So these are all like much more detailed dives into the data. So there's a lot more that could be learned from what we have so far. And really the goal in the future is to do these experiments in a much larger population. And that's the goal of our new research program that we're trying to develop. Which is like an online way of doing yoga research. And that our next session will be about that. So, all right. If there are no other questions, I know many of you joined the conference. There are going to be people either in this room or who watch later who did not. So some things to know if you want to find more resources. So we have an Instagram where all of these things get posted. You can scan that QR code to find it. And then there's also a website. And on the website right now, so I, I've realized that, you know, the world is coming back to life and there's a lot of in-person things. So I think a lot of people who wanted to participate in the conference didn't get the chance to. And so the conference is ongoing, meaning if you know people who would be interested in participating, they can still sign up and they will have 4 days. And I'll let you in on a little secret. I made it 5. It says it's 4, but then people get an extra day. To go through the conference at their own pace and really learn from all the amazing researchers. And this is still donation-based. So for the limited time, it's donation-based. And yeah, we're always looking for people to partner with to advance this mission of sharing neuroscience and yoga with everyone. So never hesitate to reach out. This will include things like conducting experiments, yoga teachers for teaching the yoga interventions. And even just ideas, like suggestions of what kinds of things we should study. So always be in contact, never hesitate. That's all I have. These are the references for anyone who wants to read some really, really awesome papers. Thank you everyone for being here and for your attention and all the awesome questions.