Andrew Huberman

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Thus far, we've been talking about stretching for sake of increasing limb flexibility and range of motion, but there are other reasons perhaps to embark on a stretching protocol that include both our ability to relax and access deep relaxation quickly.

I'd like to return to this idea and this place, this real estate within our brain that we call the insular cortex, the insula.

As you recall, way back at the,

beginning of this episode, we were talking about the von Economo neurons that Konstantin von Economo, the Austrian scientist discovered.

And the fact that we are able to make and perform interpretations of our internal landscape, pain, our dedication to a practice, for instance, whether or not we are in pain because it's a practice that we are doing intentionally and want to improve ourselves, or whether or not it's pain that's arriving through some externally imposed demands or situation.

The insula is handling all that.

And fortunately, there's a wonderful paper that was published, it was a few years ago now, in the journal Cerebral Cortex entitled, Insular Cortex Mediates Increased Pain Tolerance in Yoga Practitioners.

This study explored the effects on brain structure volume in yoga practitioners.

And for those of you out there that are aficionados in yoga,

pulled subjects from having backgrounds in the, here I'm probably going to mispronounce these different things and forgive me, the vinyasa yogas, the ashtanga yogas, the younger yogas, the sunanda yogas.

Okay, so some people were new to these practices.

Some were experienced.

The important takeaways were that they took these yoga practitioners and they didn't explore their brain structure in the context of yoga itself.

They looked at things like pain tolerance,

So they used thermal stimulation.