I recently wrote a piece for ScienceNorway on something that sits at the intersection of contemplative practice and cognitive neuroscience: how learning to regulate the body — through breath and heart rate — can help us hold our attention in an age engineered to fragment it. The yogic adage that "the mind cannot control the mind, only the body can control the mind" turns out to map surprisingly well onto current findings in interoception and attention research. Breath phase shapes perceptual sensitivity, arousal modulates focus along a well-known inverted-U, and techniques like autogenic training offer a concrete route from bodily regulation to mental control.
The article is written for a general audience and pulls together what yogis have long known with what neuroscience is now beginning to measure.
Sam