Among the foremost common misconceptions about yoga is that it’s just another sort of exercise. Perhaps this is often because people often see yogis stretching and doing pretzel-like poses. However, the truth is that the advantages of yoga are more encompassing than simply the physical. And, thanks to modern technology and functional MRI scans, we’re now able to see how regular practice affects your brain.
Here are a number of the mental benefits of yoga and the way it produces those effects by changing the structure of your brain.
Our brains are primarily made from two sorts of tissues: white and grey matter. A normal human brain consists of about 60% substantia alba and 40% grey matter . Both of which play important roles in healthy cognitive functioning, however, each brain tissue type features a different function:
Gray matter consists of your brain cells or neurons. While it’s called gray matter, in reality, it is pink in color. That’s because while you’re alive, blood continuously flows through it. After you die, it turns gray. Due to its concentration of neurons, grey matter is liable for many of your brain’s functions, including learning skills and memory. It is also responsible for the functionality of interpreting your senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch. Additionally, it affects your muscle control and self-awareness.
White matter, on the other hand, are the connections that extend from your brain cells. Its job is to connect different sections of your brain, much like how the internet interconnects the world, by allowing areas of your brain to send and receive signals to one another. As such, healthy substantia alba allows your brain to coordinate your thoughts also as your movements.
In general, both gray and substantia alba complement each other to permit you to think, coordinate movement, and interpret the planet surrounding you.Damage or reduction in one or the opposite area affects your cognitive abilities. How yoga has relevancy to our brain matter is that recent research has shown that yoga increases grey matter volume within the hippocampus and frontal sections of your brain. Research involving a comprehensive study of structural brain scans found that a person’s general intelligence is related to the quantity of grey matter therein specific area of the brain. Essentially, the thicker the volume of the gray matter in a region of your brain, the more cells are present there and thus, the more likely to perform better.