Can Yoga Really Change Your Brain? What Neuroscience Gets Right and Wrong
Neuroscience holds a kind of cultural authority. If scientists can point to a brain scan and say this lights up when you feel anxious, it sounds final, conclusive - even when the picture is far messier. Funded heavily and taken as gospel, the biomedical model treats the brain as the ultimate root of behaviour: if something goes wrong, fix the wiring with drugs or surgery. Yet decades of work have shown that success is limited. “Treatment-resistant” has become a label to mask the low efficacy of many experimental drugs.
From lobotomies once hailed as Nobel-winning science to today’s neuroimaging, our attempts to peer into the brain have produced both breakthroughs and blind alleys. EEGs measure electrical activity, fMRI scans track blood flow, and yet the knowledge we gain is often fragmentary. As sociologist Nikolas Rose points out, neuroscience has extended its reach far beyond medicine - into education, marketing, relationships, even wellbeing. The brain has become our cultural shorthand for everything.
But what if instead of focusing only on external interventions - pills, surgeries, electrodes - we paid attention to the brain’s own capacity to change itself through behaviour?
That’s where practices like yoga and meditation come in.
The Brain in Brief: Action Potentials, Pathways, and Myths
A brain event starts with an action potential - an electrical charge that zips along a neuron’s axon, triggering the release of chemicals (neurotransmitters) across a synaptic gap. Other neurons may pick it up via their branching dendrites. These pathways form vast networks that underpin behaviour.
But neat formulas like “depression = lack of serotonin” don’t hold up. The brain is less like a circuit board and more like a dense city: millions of connections lighting up, quieting down, and reorganising constantly. Glial cells, often overlooked, keep this city running: speeding up electrical signals with myelin, recycling neurotransmitters, and supporting neuronal growth.
And the “left brain vs right brain” personality myth? Almost entirely unsupported by credible evidence.
Yoga, Meditation, and the Circuits of Change
Neuroscientists now study the brain not just region by region, but as overlapping networks. Three in particular stand out in yoga research:
Default Mode Network (DMN): linked to memory, imagination, and emotional processing.
Salience Network (SN): decides what deserves attention, integrating emotions with bodily states (think “fight or flight” triggers).
Central Executive Network (CEN): handles working memory, planning, and demanding thought.
Yoga and meditation have been shown to reshape these networks, creating shifts in both state (temporary changes while practising) and trait (long-term structural changes).
Spotlight on the Amygdala: Taming the Brain’s Alarm Bell
The amygdala - two almond-sized clusters deep in the temporal lobe - is usually cast as the villain of the brain. It lights up with anxiety, PTSD, depression, or any strong negative emotion. But it also regulates attention, sensory processing, and emotional learning.
Studies of long-term meditators show that the amygdala can actually grow in size while becoming less reactive to negative stimuli. One experiment compared compassion meditation with simple relaxation and found that compassion practice reduced anxiety while changing how participants rated “happy” and “sad” pictures.
This suggests that meditation doesn’t just calm you down, it rewires emotional processing at a fundamental level.
The Hippocampus: Memory, Learning, and Yoga’s Subtle Boost
Another hotspot, the hippocampus, helps us learn and store both short- and long-term memories. It’s also vulnerable to age-related decline, stress, and disease. Some studies suggest yoga may increase grey matter density here, though findings are mixed. Still, the idea that yoga might help keep memory sharp has become part of its cultural selling point, from “yoga for kids’ school performance” to “yoga for ageing well.”
White Matter and the Brain’s Speedways
If grey matter is the city’s buildings, white matter is the motorway system. It’s made of myelin, a fatty sheath that insulates axons and speeds up signals. Yoga and meditation appear to promote myelination, strengthening these neural highways. Think of it like walking a path through tall grass: the more you walk it, the clearer—and faster—it becomes.
Two Types of Training: States and Networks
Ultimately, yoga affects the brain in two ways:
State Training – entering temporary, specific mental states (relaxed attention, focused compassion).
Network Training – reshaping the larger circuits of the brain, strengthening certain patterns over time.
This dual impact—moment-to-moment shifts and long-term rewiring—may explain why yoga and meditation have drawn such sustained interest from neuroscience.
The question isn’t just whether yoga changes the brain - it clearly does - but how much of this evidence is causal, how much is correlation, and what might it mean for the future of mental health beyond pills and scalpels?