The video presents a comprehensive overview of the Neuroscience and Yoga Online Conference, tracing its origins to a 2014 campus event during Brain Awareness Week that aimed to share neuroscience with the public through yoga. The pandemic prompted a shift from in‑person gatherings to a fully online format, expanding the reach to international researchers and yoga teachers. The conference spans three to four days and blends scientific presentations, live yoga classes, and pre‑ and post‑yoga neurophysiological experiments. Each day focuses on a distinct theme—cognition, mental health, pain processing, child development, brain aging and addiction, empathy, trauma, and neurological conditions such as stroke, epilepsy, and multiple sclerosis—providing depth while maintaining accessibility. Notable speakers include Dr. Satbir Khalsa, Lauren Duke, and Dr. Ben Rhine, whose work has been featured in high‑profile journals and media outlets. The community aspect is highlighted through photos from past events, illustrating a growing, engaged audience. A recurring workshop teaches participants how to locate, read, and interpret scientific abstracts via PubMed, identify study designs, and assess evidence levels. Participants then break into small groups to find papers on topics of interest, summarize findings, and generate hypotheses, exemplified by a prediction that yoga reduces perceived stress. Overall, the conference aims to democratize neuroscience knowledge, empower non‑scientists with research literacy, and foster interdisciplinary dialogue between neuroscience and yoga.
Chapters
Science is not a monopoly. It's not owned by scientists, it's not owned by doctors. It belongs to the public, and it's a process of acquiring and confirming knowledge. And yoga is about the same thing. It's about acquiring and confirming knowledge of the self. I started hosting events about neuroscience and yoga in 2014, which is when I was still in college. And it was for Brain Awareness Week, which is an international celebration of neuroscience, and it was a really, really big deal at my university where I went.
So it's all just to demonstrate to the kids how the brain works a little bit, to get them interested in thinking about human emotions or how they make decisions.
That was kind of the environment that this event was born in, really in the spirit of sharing science with everyone. And particularly in respect to yoga.
The parietal cortex is responsible for organizing space around you. So planning movements or like reaches, or if you want to make an eye movement to a particular area.
For years now, a lot of people have been interested in these events. So these are just some of the photos across the years. And I have more photos and more photos, photos from last year's conference. So we're a big community of people who are really interested in this.
But then with the pandemic and a lot of changes that had to happen with in-person events, we ended up making it an online event. And at that point, it was an opportunity.
Speakers and yoga teachers, and you're going to meet each of them through their sessions. Each session will start with an introduction, but I, I can't emphasize enough how amazing each speaker is. I look up to all of them. They've been recognized in so many reputable sources like scientific journals, the Journal of American Medicine, the New England Journal, the Journal of Internal Medicine, news sources like Time Magazine, Scientific American, NPR, TED, the New York Times.
Now we could invite people, the researchers themselves, from all over the world to present their work rather than having students who are local present their work.
I have the honor of introducing Dr. Satbir Khalsa. I'd like to introduce now Lauren Duke. I have the honor of introducing Dr. Ben Rhine. Dr. Rhine is a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Stanford University.
What this opened up was the opportunity for a true conference, you know, a bringing together of a lot of people from all over the place. to try to share science about yoga, particularly neuroscience, brain science about yoga. The Neuroscience and Yoga Online Conference is about 3 to 4 days. It includes presentations, and there are also yoga classes with teachers from all over the world. There are experiments, scientific experiments before and after the yoga classes, so you can really see the effects of yoga on your own and your peers' neurophysiology.
What are they calling yoga?
And all of this again is with the goal of sharing neuroscience of yoga with everyone. And we do different topics, so each day of the conference has a different theme: yoga and cognition, yoga and mental health, yoga and pain processing, yoga and child development, yoga and brain aging and addiction, and then yoga and empathy, yoga and trauma, and yoga and neurological conditions like stroke and epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. Because it's multiple days, we're covering so many different things, and so I think the conference is super cool because it gives a wide range of topics but still at a very knowledgeable and respectful amount of depth. There's so much that comes from the researchers Because they're coming from a place of, you know, this is what they study. This is their really unique niche interest. They present their work and you're immediately sucked into their world of fascination and you really get that infectious enthusiasm.
I'm Dr. Jojo Kwok from the School of Nursing, University of Hong Kong. I'm a nurse, researcher, and yoga instructor.
One of the main events of the conference every year is about how to find and read and interpret a scientific abstract. This is publicly available. You can go on pubmed.gov and you can find every published abstract from every paper, every scientific paper going back 100 years, which is an incredible resource. And knowing that, knowing how to access it, and knowing how to read it and interpret it and draw rational conclusions from what you read is a very, very empowering skill that I want everyone to have.
I'm presuming that most of you are not scientists and haven't looked at a lot of abstracts. That's what we're doing here. But a cheap trick is that usually the title or somewhere in the abstract, it will tell you, was it a case series? Was it a controlled trial? Was it randomized? Is it a meta-analysis? So typically it will tell you what the authors have characterized the level of evidence. But what we're going to do right now is go through some of these things and talk about how a study earns its level of evidence.
This year we added a workshop on it where people, after learning about how to find and read the abstracts, we generated a list of topics that we as a group were interested in, and then we broke out into small groups and worked as teams to find papers and summarize them. on those topics, and it was really incredible. 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.
Everyone is kind of on their journey of learning, and the goal is to just take someone where they're starting from and bring them to the next step and try to help people advance their skills and knowledge. Sometimes I I'm not sure the conference is, you know, helping people. And then I saw this and people were learning so much, and I was like, wow, if people walk away being able to do this regularly, like, I think that that's everything I could ask for.
