|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In 1981, Harvard Medical School researcher Herbert Benson traveled to Tibet to meet with three Buddhist monks expertly trained in a form of yoga named g-tummo, a practice that is popularly associated with the ability to warm your body temperature through concentration. His academic interest in the practice lies in his research focus on mind body medicine, described in his official biography: The impetus for his research was to see if subjective reports of g-tummo practitioners raising their body temperature could be validated scientifically. A 2013 review of research on the topic described g-tummo as a specialized practice whose methods are known to few: Benson’s aims, as well as the results of his investigation, are described in the abstract to his study, published in Nature in 1982: In that study, Benson concluded that the most likely mechanism to account for the increase in finger and toe temperature is vasodilation,—the widening of blood vessels to reduce blood pressure. A follow-up study also completed by Benson’s research group in 2000 lent some credence to this notion when they found that portions of the brain responsible for some autosomatic aspects of your body — like vasodilation — appear to be activated when subjects practiced g tummo. All that said, other researchers feel as though the results of Benson’s research have been exaggerated in the popular media, as discussed in a 2013 study looking to reproduce the work of Benson and his colleagues: In that study, researchers broadly confirmed the findings of Benson’s group, with the added observation that two specific types of g-tummo exercises — Forceful Breath (FB) and Gentle Breath (GB) — act in different ways to increase body temperature: They concluded that the Forceful Breath method can indeed raise core body temperatures into the mild fever range:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}