Jonathan RosenthalNeurologist, NCS · Neurologist at NuVasive Clinical Services

2024 Neuroscience and Yoga Online Conference

15 Feb 2024 · 3 min

Watch on YouTube

2:44

In this promotional announcement, Jonathan Rosenthal introduces the 2024 Neuroscience and Yoga Online Conference, a four‑day virtual event designed to combat the spread of scientific misinformation by presenting rigorous, evidence‑based research on how yoga influences the brain. The conference aims to equip participants—yogis, teachers, clinicians, and advocates—with concrete scientific knowledge they can use to promote yoga in schools, healthcare settings, and policy arenas. Day 1 provides foundational introductions to yoga, neuroscience, and how to critically read scientific papers, requiring no prior expertise. The subsequent three days each focus on a specific health domain: (1) yoga’s impact on cancer‑related fatigue, cognitive changes, mood, and neuropathy; (2) yoga for sleep disturbances and insomnia; and (3) yoga for eating disorders, an emerging research area. Each day combines expert research presentations, yoga classes led by top instructors, pre‑ and post‑session experiments, live Q&A with researchers, and concluding discussion groups where attendees collaboratively review papers and extract actionable evidence for advocacy. The overall message is an enthusiastic invitation to join a community dedicated to translating neuroscience findings into practical yoga practice and broader societal change.

Chapters

Hello everyone. This is Jonathan here. I am so incredibly excited to announce the 2024 Neuroscience and Yoga Online Conference. This conference is so especially important right now, given we live in a time when science misinformation runs rampant on the internet, and what this conference really does is share the actual science of how yoga affects the brain so that yogis everywhere can improve how they practice, teach, and advocate for yoga. And this advocating part is a really huge focus in the conference this year. The main goal is that everyone should be able to leave with a new piece of scientific knowledge, evidence-based knowledge, that they can bring to a school, a healthcare setting, a governmental organization, and more to really affect change. There are 4 days to the conference this year. The first day is all about introductions. Introduction to yoga. What do we mean when we say yoga? Introduction to neuroscience. Introduction to how to read a scientific paper, which is a life-changing skill. So you don't have to come to the conference with any prior knowledge. You'll get that on the first day. The next 3 days each have a different topic, and the topics include yoga and cancer, really focusing on the comorbidities of cancer. So fatigue, cognitive changes, mood changes, and neuropathy. And the second day, yoga and sleep and insomnia. And then finally, yoga and eating disorders, which is a huge topic of burgeoning research in the scientific literature that I think you'll find very interesting. Each day of the conference will consist of presentations from the experts. So these are the people who do the primary work, the primary research on these topics. Yoga classes with top teachers, experiments before and after the yoga classes. And question and answer sessions with the researchers. Each day will end with a discussion group, which is a chance to meet everyone from all over the world attending, and we'll practice looking up papers together and extracting specific evidence-based pieces of knowledge that we will bring to advocate for yoga. And that's an overview of the conference. I hope you are as excited as I am about this, and I hope to see you there.