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Cognitive behavior evaluation based on physiological parameters among young healthy subjects with yoga as
H Nagendra1, Vinod Kumar2, S Mukherjee3
1Faculty in E & CE Department, Poojya Doddappa Appa College of Engineering, Kalaburagi 585 102, India ; Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee 247 667, India.
Objective:
To investigate the effect of yoga practice on cognitive skills, autonomic nervous system, and heart rate variability by analyzing physiological parameters.
Methods:
The study was conducted on 30 normal young healthy engineering students. They were randomly selected into two groups: yoga group and control group. The yoga group practiced yoga one and half hour per day for six days in a week, for a period of five months.
Results:
The yoga practising group showed increased α, β, and δ EEG band powers and significant reduction in θ and γ band powers. The increased α and β power can represent enhanced cognitive functions such as memory and concentration, and that of δ signifies synchronization of brain activity. The heart rate index θ/α decreased, neural activity β/θ increased, attention resource index β/(α + θ) increased, executive load index (δ + θ)/α decreased, and the ratio (δ + θ)/(α + β) decreased. The yoga practice group showed improvement in heart rate variability, increased SDNN/RMSSD, and reduction in LF/HF ratio.
Conclusion:
Yoga practising group showed significant improvement in various cognitive functions, such as performance enhancement, neural activity, attention, and executive function. It also resulted in increase in the heart rate variability, parasympathetic nervous system activity, and balanced autonomic nervous system reactivity.
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