Harvard Yoga Scientists Find Proof of Meditation Benefit

I share below an interesting piece about the benefits of Yoga & Meditation, just that this study is by  a team of Harvard Scientists and Researchers.

Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images

People take part in a meditation day for peace in Colombia at Bolivar Square in Bogota, on Sept. 28, 2013.

Scientists are getting close to proving what yogis have held to be true for centuries -- yoga and meditation can ward off stress and disease.

                   

Yoga

Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

A man practices yoga on the waterfront at Nariman Point in Mumbai.

A man practices yoga on the waterfront at Nariman Point in Mumbai. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

John Denninger, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, is leading a five-year study on how the ancient practices affect genes and brain activity in the chronically stressed. His latest work follows a study he and others published earlier this year showing how so-called mind-body techniques can switch on and off some genes linked to stress and immune function.
While hundreds of studies have been conducted on the mental health benefits of yoga and meditation, they have tended to rely on blunt tools like participant questionnaires, as well as heart rate and blood pressure monitoring. Only recently have neuro-imaging and genomics technology used in Denninger’s latest studies allowed scientists to measure physiological changes in greater detail.
“There is a true biological effect,” said Denninger, director of research at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, one of Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospitals. “The kinds of things that happen when you meditate do have effects throughout the body, not just in the brain.”
The government-funded study may persuade more doctors to try an alternative route for tackling the source of a myriad of modern ailments. Stress-induced conditions can include everything from hypertension and infertility to depression and even the aging process. They account for 60 to 90 percent of doctor’s visits in the U.S., according to the Benson-Henry Institute. The World Health Organization estimates stress costs U.S. companies at least $300 billion a year through absenteeism, turn-over and low productivity.

Seinfeld, Murdoch

The science is advancing alongside a budding “mindfulness” movement, which includes meditation devotees such as Bill George, board member of Goldman Sachs Group and Exxon Mobil Corp., and comedian Jerry Seinfeld. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch recently revealed on Twitter that he is giving meditation a try.
As a psychiatrist specializing in depression, Denninger said he was attracted to mind-body medicine, pioneered in the late 1960s by Harvard professor Herbert Benson, as a possible way to prevent the onset of depression through stress reduction. While treatment with pharmaceuticals is still essential, he sees yoga and meditation as useful additions to his medical arsenal.

Exchange Program

It’s an interest that dates back to an exchange program he attended in China the summer before entering Harvard as an undergraduate student. At Hangzhou University he trained with a tai chi master every morning for three weeks.
“By the end of my time there, I had gotten through my thick teenage skull that there was something very important about the breath and about inhabiting the present moment,” he said. “I’ve carried that with me since then.”
His current study, to conclude in 2015 with about $3.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, tracks 210 healthy subjects with high levels of reported chronic stress for six months. They are divided in three groups.
One group with 70 participants perform a form of yoga known as Kundalini, another 70 meditate and the rest listen to stress education audiobooks, all for 20 minutes a day at home. Kundalini is a form of yoga that incorporates meditation, breathing exercises and the singing of mantras in addition to postures. Denninger said it was chosen for the study because of its strong meditation component.
Participants come into the lab for weekly instruction for two months, followed by three sessions where they answer questionnaires, give blood samples used for genomic analysis and undergo neuro-imaging tests.

‘Immortality Enzyme’

Unlike earlier studies, this one is the first to focus on participants with high levels of stress. The study published in May in the medical journal PloS One showed that one session of relaxation-response practice was enough to enhance the expression of genes involved in energy metabolism and insulin secretion and reduce expression of genes linked to inflammatory response and stress. There was an effect even among novices who had never practiced before.
Harvard isn’t the only place where scientists have started examining the biology behind yoga.
In a study published last year, scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles and Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn found that 12 minutes of daily yoga meditation for eight weeks increased telomerase activity by 43 percent, suggesting an improvement in stress-induced aging. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, shared the Nobel medicine prize in 2009 with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for research on the telomerase “immortality enzyme,” which slows the cellular aging process.

Build Resilience

Not all patients will be able to stick to a daily regimen of exercise and relaxation. Nor should they have to, according to Denninger and others. Simply knowing breath-management techniques and having a better understanding of stress can help build resilience.
“A certain amount of stress can be helpful,” said Sophia Dunn, a clinical psychotherapist who trained at King’s College London. “Yoga and meditation are tools for enabling us to swim in difficult waters.”

Bangalore and Hyperloop

I read Elon Musk's hyperloop while "accepting' a LinkedIn request yesterday. For a Bangalorean this idea seems outlandish and far-fetched. As a tax-paying citizen forced to use just 40-50% of any decent & big road (its just 20-30% on indecent and smaller roads) because of year-round (decade-round?!) digging by various government and private bodies, the idea of a hyperloop which can take upto 10 years (in US) which means 7 in Japan and 5 in China and easily upto 30 in India and 50 in Bangalore has sort of numbed all my senses. Unable to write any further, I share the original post below.

Hyperloop

So, the news is out—in a 57-page pdf that will take some time to digest. Elon Musk revealed the Hyperloop to the world, and it's a gift: an open-source plan that anyone can build... if they have several billions to spare and the ability to loop around the bureaucracy likely to bedevil such a project. It’s great that he’s open-sourcing it, but it’s his support, not the idea itself, that gives the Hyperloop credibility right now.

To be sure, if one person or group goes for it, they'll be crazy not to get Elon as an advisor (at the very least), and that alone would keep most other parties from even trying.

As for the specifics, the Hyperloop runs above the ground—well above the ground—on a track supported by posts that will roughly follow the route of Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. (That highway looks straight on a map, but it is actually pretty curvy near both Los Angeles and San Francisco, exactly where land prices are highest and neighbors most likely to object, either for money or on principle.) The posts are designed like any modern building in California, says Musk... to be earthquake-resistant. If there’s a really big one, he adds, we’ll have more problems than just a broken Hyperloop. Fair enough.

But Hyperloop will still need (unfortunately) a huge amount of security, both for passenger screening and from errant intruders. It’s not that there will be that many people in the system at any one time, but it will be a tempting target.

To be candid, I’m a bit underwhelmed. Musk's contribution to the successes at Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX were not just his ideas; each of these is a company he and others built from an idea up—but not without a lot of struggle, smarts and energy.

As I said earlier, the Hyperloop business model is different from that of airlines, because the marginal cost of carrying people will be very low for a system that uses a tunnel at anything near capacity. (Of course, the actual capital cost would be huge.) Rush-hour prices are likely to be very high, though competitive with airlines, while off-peak rides could be priced like a bus or even lower. Six-person pods every half minute... that's a lot of traffic! (720 people per hour, though that, like many other details, could change.

He envisions LA to San Francisco as the base case, though on the call he mused about doing a smaller, demonstration system himself. But the essence of this system is precisely in its scale—its ability to fundamentally change the the dynamics of transportation between San Francisco and LA. A demo won't demonstrate much.

However, the real question for the Hyperloop is its advantage over alternatives. The use of tunnels would allow people to travel from city center to city center easily (after a 10-year-or-more period of disruptive city-center construction)... but you could get an almost equivalent benefit at significantly lower cost per city simply by extending the mass transit system to include the airports, as is finally happening in many US cities – San Francisco, sort of; Boston; Atlanta; Chicago; Washington DC; and a few more (as well as many around the world). The issue is less being in the city center, which isn't really walking distance from most of any serious city, but being integrated with the mass transit system. Within Western Europe, where they have done this in most large cities, people rarely fly any more; the train is simpler.

Yes, it's not that I wouldn't like to zip from New York to LA in half an hour, reliably, but that this seems a bit ill-timed from a public perception perspective at a moment when Skype and Google hangouts and the like are reducing our need for travel. But if they ever do build it, it will certainly get used. The operating costs (in energy and money) will be a trifle compared to the capital required. All aboard! 

Europe's tallest blunder...

Europe’s tallest residential building has no elevators     

 

The InTempo skyscraper was meant to signal economic prosperity; instead, it's causing national embarrassment. Reuters/Heino Kalis

 

On the Mediterranean coast, in the town known for pioneering cheap package tourism, Spain is building what will be Europe’s tallest residential building. Benidorm’s InTempo skyscraper is a gargantuan structure—some 650 feet (200 meters)  tall—and architecturally ambitious: Two separate towers are conjoined over 550 feet in the air by an inverted cone which will house a massive garden and pool. But it’s also massively flawed: It doesn’t have any elevators capable of going all the way to the top.

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In Spain, Benidorm is known as the “New York of the Mediterranean.”

At the heart of the problem is the project’s rapid evolution. When first conceived, it was to stand only 20 stories tall, but that number quickly shot up to 47, and the elevator plans didn’t change accordingly. The elevator shafts are only spacious enough for lifts and motor equipment capable of scaling the original, 20 stories.

The building’s construction has also suffered financing setbacks. The project was initially backed by a local bank called Caixa Galicia in 2005, but the bank has since gone under. Currently, ownership of the building is cripplingly complex: a bank called Sareb owns the debt; the property belongs to a development company called Olga Urbana; and real estate company Maxxima is the only body capable of selling it, according to a signed contract, reports Spanish newspaper El Pais (link in Spanish)

Fixing InTempo’s structural flaws will mean tampering with its architectural vision, and funneling even more money into the project. The only viable way to correct for the builder’s design gaffe is to erect external elevator shafts. Whether the developers can handle the added expense, and the market is willing to forgive the project’s series of missteps, remains to be seen. Some 45% of the skyscraper’s 269 apartments have already been sold, but “sales are going slower now,” the project’s architect, Roberto Pérez Guerras, told El Mundo (Spanish) earlier this month. InTempo’s grand opening is scheduled for December of 2013, a date that now seems quite unlikely to be met.