The review, led by Neha Gothe, director of the Exercise Psychology Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, examined 11 peer-reviewed papers that used various types of brain scans to assess the impact of yoga practice on the brain. Gothe and her colleagues limited their review to studies in which all three major elements of yoga were included: the physical poses, breathing exercises, and meditation or mindfulness. Six of the studies compared the brains of longtime practitioners to “yoga-naive” people who were typically matched by age, health, and fitness or level of physical activity. Five examined yoga as an intervention, scanning the brains of subjects before and after they were randomly assigned to a defined period of yoga practice or a control group.