Courtesy, The Hindu excerpts regarding an extraordinary find that indicates ‘Brain surgery’ during Harappan civilisation…
…Scientists at the Anthropological Survey of India claim to have found evidence of an ancient brain surgical practice on a Bronze Age Harappan skull. The skull, believed to be around 4,300 years old, bears an incision that indicates an “unequivocal case” of a surgical practice known as trepanation, says a research paper published in the latest edition of Current Science.

Trepanation, a common means of surgery practised in prehistoric societies starting with the Stone Age, involved drilling or cutting …

Stumbled on this yesterday in the NY Times (emphasis added):
“We started this, really, for our kids,” said Dr. Shukla, a urologist and a second-generation Indian-American. “When our kids go to school and say they are Hindu, nobody says, ‘Oh, yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.’ They say, ‘What caste are you?’ Or ‘Do you pray to a monkey god?’ Because that’s all Americans know about Hinduism.”
The “Dr Shukla” mentioned in the article is Dr Aseem Shukla and what he is talking about is the “take Yoga Back movement..Below, some excerpts …

Courtesy PsyBlog, here is how cognition can be accelerated by just 4 x 20 minutes Meditation:
…In a new study reported in the journal Consciousness and Cognition…researchers found significant benefits for novice meditators from only 80 minutes of meditation over 4 days (Zeidan et al., 2010).
Despite their very brief period of practice — and compared with a control group who listened to an audiobook of Tolkein’s The Hobbit— meditators improved on measures of working memory, executive functioning and visuo-spatial processing.

An ascetic, in the Yogasana pose. dated from 8th century.
Image Source: Museum …

This weekend, three excerpts – on three very different topics – sent to me by three friends.
The first is an excerpt from a keynote speech delivered by Sh Sam Pitroda on “India in a globalized world” at Nehru Centre, Mumbai (Thanks Prashant):
…Today, education is definitely on the national agenda. I believe that this is a great window of opportunity because we have a very large young population. We are prepared to invest on education. Our economy is growing at 8 to 10%. But, at the same time, don’t have big …

Courtesy, Sridhar Pai:
The MP High Court orders government *not* to make Surya Namaskar and Pranayam mandatory for students…
…even as yoga for kids is now being taught in studios from Minnetonka, USA to Moscow in Russia.
Sigh.
.
Related Posts:
Super Brain Yoga – I want to trademark this!
High-Tech Pranayama
No more “Christian Yoga”
After Christian Yoga, Islamic Yoga*…

I was alerted to this by a reader…quite remarkable:
Sushruta lays down the basic principles of plastic surgery by advocating a proper physiotherapy before the operation and describes various methods or different types of defects, viz., (1) release of the skin for covering small defects, (2) rotation of the flaps to make up for the partial loss and (3) pedicle flaps for covering complete loss of skin from an area. He has mentioned various methods including sliding graft, rotation graft and pedicle graft. Nasal repair or rhinoplasty has been described in …