Andrew Huberman

Basically they put people into conditions where they gave them very hot or very cold stimuli and compared those yoga practitioners of varying levels of yoga experience to those that had no experience with yoga, so-called controls.

And they found some really interesting things.

There are a lot of data on this paper,

Here's something I'd like to highlight.

The pain tolerance of yoga practitioners was double or more to that of non-yoga practitioners.

They also found significant increases in insular, again, the insula, this brain region, gray matter volume.

Typically when we talk about gray matter, we're talking about the so-called cell bodies, the location in neurons where the genome is housed.

where all the housekeeping stuff is there.

And then white matter volume tends to be the axons, the wires, because they're in sheets with this stuff that appears white in MRIs and indeed is white under the microscope and indeed is white.

It's actually lipid, which is myelin.

So increased gray matter volume of the insula is a significant finding because what it suggests is that people that are doing yoga have an increased volume of these areas of the brain that are associated

with interoceptive awareness and for being able to make judgments about pain and why one is experiencing pain, not just to lean away from pain, but to utilize or leverage or even overcome pain.

And I find this interesting because there are a lot of activities out there that don't create these kinds of changes in brain volume, especially within the insula.

So it appears that it's not just the performance of the yogic movements, but the overcoming or the kind of pushing into the end ranges of motion and to push through discomfort to some extent.

Of course, we want people doing that in a healthy, safe way, but that's allows yoga practitioners to build up the structure and function

of these brain areas that allow them to cope with pain better than other individuals and to cope with other kinds of interoceptive challenges, if you will, not just pain, but cold, not just pain, but discomfort of being in a particular position to do that.

And again, we wouldn't want people placing themselves into a compromised position literally that would harm them, especially given that earlier we heard

that microstretching of the kind of non-painful sort, low intensity sort is actually going to be more effective for increasing end range of motion.

But this study really emphasizes the extent to which practitioners of yoga don't just learn movements, they learn how to control their nervous system in ways that really reshapes their relationship

to pain, to flexibility, and to the kinds of things that the neuromuscular system was designed to do.