Cerebral autoregulation and sympathetic nervous system activity (SNS) while performing cognitive tasks during yoga practices which have different effects on SNS

Cerebral blood flow is associated with cognitive performance, attention and working memory. To understand the association between sympathetic nerve activity and cerebral autoregulation in normal healthy practitioners. Increased sympathetic nervous system activity has been associated with better performance in cognitive tasks such as attention¹, memory², perception^3,4, and social cognition⁵. Certain yoga breathing practices are associated with signs of reduced sympathetic activity^6,7 while other yoga breathing practices have been associated with increased sympathetic activity. Irrespective of whether a yoga breathing practice increases sympathetic nervous system activity or decreases it, there has been evidence of better performance in tasks requiring focused attention. This suggests that attention may be independent of sympathetic nervous system activity. For both categories of breathing practices, we found improved performance in attention tasks. Despite sympathetic activity being reduced with improved attention after alternate nostril breathing (<em>anuloma viloma pranayama</em>)⁸while sympathetic nervous system activity increased with better attention⁹ after right uninostril breathing. In none of the studies, sympathetic nervous system activity was assessed at the same time during cognitive task performance.