Fri, Jun 28 to Sun, Jun 30

10:15 AM - 5:00 PM

Suggested Donation

In-person Attendance: $200 for 3 days or $75/day. Online Attendance Only: $150 for 3 days or $60/day.

Researchers from the Haskins Labs group at Yale University, working with members of the Ananda Ashram community to create a new East-West Science Initiative, will be collaborating with the East~West Sanskrit Institute based in San Francisco, CA. The purpose of this Intensive Weekend is to study the effects of Sanskrit learning on brain activity and cognitive function.

Selected participants will wear EEG caps specifically wired to the parts of the brain responsible for speech and writing. Subjects will chant the Sanskrit alphabet, verses and sutras -- along with the audience -- and will write devanāgarī letters to explore the changes in the brain's responses.

Please join researchers for an enjoyable scientific exploration!

This event, hosted by the School of Sanskrit at Ananda Ashram, will also be streamed online.

Dr. Ken Pugh has been the Director of Research at Haskins Laboratories since 2009. He holds faculty appointments at the University of Connecticut and at Yale University. Over the last two decades, his research program has employed integrated genetic, neuroimaging, and cognitive methods to explicate brain-based attention, memory and cognition. He has a special focus on typical and atypical language and on reading development in children. At the age of 16, Ken Pugh began seven years training as a Jain monk (living in the U.S. and in India). This early immersion in meditation practices and in the formal study of Jain philosophy (with its emphasis on non-violence, ethics, logic and epistemology) has shaped his approach to the study of the brain and mind.

Indira Bulkin met Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati in 1971 at Ananda Ashram in Monroe, NY. She immediately started studying and then teaching the Sanskrit language. In the early 1980s Guruji named her head of the Sanskrit Department at the Yoga Society of San Francisco, a position she held until 2010. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 1993 with a BA in the Sanskrit Language, before earning her Master’s Degree in Physical Therapy. She co-founded the East-West Sanskrit Institute in 2010 with her husband Shanta Bulkin.

Shanta Bulkin met Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati at Ananda Ashram in the summer of 1972. Some 50 years later, it has become his passion to help promote the Sanskrit language as a Tool for Meditation, to support the concept of parampara, and to help continue this "Science of Vibration" for the next generation. He co-founded the East-West Sanskrit Institute in 2010, based in California, with his wife, Indira Bulkin.

For questions about the program, please email Shanta.

Mark your calendars now for our annual World Sanskrit Day Celebrartion.