Pod Insights Hidden Brain Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1 About this episode Food, safety, and strong relationships are essential to our survival. Psychologist Lisa Miller says our brains also crave something else: transcendence. She suggests that spirituality is a universal human capacity, and that feeling connected to something larger than ourselves may be essential to a fulfilling life.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
0:04 Shankar Vedantam? Thomas Hood was a 19th century English poet known for his elegant, often melancholy verse.
0:11 Shankar Vedantam? His 1826 poem, "I Remember, I Remember," captures a feeling that is familiar to many adults, especially its wistful last lines. "I remember, I remember, the fir trees dark and high. I used to think their slender tops were close against the sky. It was a childish ignorance, but now tis little joy to know I'm farther off from heaven than when I was a boy."
0:39 Shankar Vedantam? Thomas Hood's poem gestures to the reality that as grownups, many of us lack the effortless sense of connection and awe that we felt as kids.
0:49 Shankar Vedantam? Was that intimate bond with the universe merely an illusion of childhood? Or a real, measurable human capacity that we can access as grownups?
0:59 Shankar Vedantam? Researchers are investigating the ways that we can preserve or revive the sense of being close to the sky that Thomas Hood so tenderly evoked.
1:12 Shankar Vedantam? This week on Hidden Brain, we explore what it means to feel closer to heaven and the value of looking for transcendence in our busy, bustling lives.
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3:11 Shankar Vedantam? These days, we are encouraged and even exhorted to optimize every aspect of our lives: our bodies, our relationships, our productivity. But what about the parts of us that yearn for meaning, for understanding, for wisdom? Those aspects of ourselves are often ignored in our tireless pursuit of worldly rewards. At Columbia University, psychologist Lisa Miller studies the science of transcendence. Lisa Miller, welcome to Hidden Brain.
3:41 Speaker 02 I'm so grateful to be here. I appreciate so much your show, the way you go deeper, the way you open up the double door in our life. So, Shankar, thank you for having me.
3:53 Shankar Vedantam? Lisa, early on in your career as a psychologist, you treated a young woman named Iliana. Can you describe her for me and tell me what brought her into your clinic?
4:04 Speaker 02 Shankar, Iliana was only 12 years old. She was in middle school. This was in New York. And she came in one day all by herself to the clinic. Generally, of course, young people are accompanied by a grandparent or a parent, someone, break of some. This little girl was hunched, her arms wrapped tight. And when I invited her in to say, what has brought you here? The first thing she said was, two men had walked into her father's store. Her father owned a corner deli. Two men who he knew had walked into his store, robbed him, and then taken his life.
4:48 Speaker 02 Her father was her sun, her moon, her stars. She was devastated. Iliana was beyond bereft. She could barely move through the day. But equally, she was living in her new setting with her mother and her mother's mother. Both women had escaped themselves, very perilous and painful situations. And they were quite understandably guarded and had yet to benefit from therapy. So in this setting, Iliana was really, basically on a lockdown, a social lockdown. She wasn't allowed to go out and see friends. She wasn't allowed to go to the school dance.
5:31 Speaker 02 She'd gone from being the apple of her father's eye to living in a very cold, restrictive environment. The treatment of the day would suggest help her renegotiate her condition, help her make sense of what had happened, address the trauma, the brutality of her father's death, and the wrongness, the moral and spiritual injury of her father's death. But all of the treatment, as usual, was not moving the needle. I mean, you know, every day that a patient comes into the clinic, we do a quick assessment, one to 10, how are you? And she was never above a five. It was a four, it was a three, it was a five, never above a five.
6:16 Speaker 02 Well, one day, she came absolutely skipping it, night and day. It was a whole different presentation clinically.
6:27 Speaker 02 It was as if the lights had been powered back on. And I said, please, please come in, Iliana. Tell me, what is on your heart? What has happened? And she said, bouncing in her seat, joyfully, she looked me in the eye. She said, you're not going to believe this. You're not going to believe this. I was finally allowed to go to a dance. And I met a boy, and he was so polite, and he was so nice. And we talked for 20 minutes, which is a long time in eighth grade. And you're not going to believe it. Guess what his name is?
7:05 Shankar Vedantam? Iliana told Lisa that the boy she'd met had an extremely unusual name. And it turned out, it was the same unusual name of her dead father.
7:18 Speaker 02 And she said, well, don't you see, Dr. Miller? My father's watching over me. My father's protecting me. My father's right here with me.
7:35 Shankar Vedantam? I understand that shortly before she went on this dance, Iliana's grandmother had organized a traditional Dominican ceremony to honor her father. Describe the ceremony for me, Lisa. What happened there?
7:50 Speaker 02 Iliana's family had a beautiful tradition that was coming from the Dominican Republic, a blend of many faith traditions, in which they honored the deceased, much as, you know, many, many traditions do. What was important to Iliana was that when they held the ceremony to honor her father with prayers, with candles, with photos, Iliana, through the ceremony, knew her father's spirit was alive and real and in relationship to the family. So that shortly thereafter, when she met a boy at the dance who shared the very same
8:33 Speaker 02 name as her father, she had a depth of spiritual understanding that her father walks with her. She says, my father is looking after me. He is protecting me.
9:01 Shankar Vedantam? I understand, Lee Saad, that you had a similar experience working on a psychiatric inpatient unit. Tell me about what life was like on that unit and an intervention, an unusual intervention that you came up with at one point.
9:17 Speaker 02 Shankar, I worked on an inpatient unit in Manhattan where so many of the patients suffered terribly. Some had recurrent, very deep, major depression. Some struggled with addiction, others schizophrenia. The time in which I happened to be an intern on the unit was the time of the Jewish holidays. This hospital happened to serve a great number of people who are Jewish.
9:42 Speaker 02 As the holidays approached, one morning in our community meeting, a gentleman raised his hand. He was someone who was known as very explosive as he struggled with bipolar. He'd become very angry, maybe toss a chair, yell and march out. So it was he, of all people, who raised his hand in a full community meeting, 30 people in a circle, under the flickering lights. He raised his hand and said, "What will we be doing for yom kippur?"
10:16 Speaker 02 And the unit chief, a very nice man, sort of looked at his foot and said, "I'm sorry, we don't have anything. The rabbis will be going home to their own families." What, what? Nothing for yom kippur? And he became more and more upset, explosive, tossed the chair and walked out of the room.
10:39 Shankar Vedantam? So I understand that you decided to arrange an informal yom kippur service on the ward. Describe the scene for me.
10:48 Speaker 02 Well, I'm not a rabbi, but I did have at that time about two and a half decades of experience with yom kippur services. So I approached the unit chief, who gave me permission and said, "Sure, if you want to come in on yom kippur, that's your decision." I found in a box in my apartment a beautiful, weathered prayer book that had been my grandmother's.
11:12 Speaker 02 That day when I arrived to the unit, the patients were all dressed beautifully. No hospital gowns or gurneys. Our so-called sanctuary was the back room, the kitchen, with its linoleum table and its fluorescent lights, but it felt sanctified. And there we were. There were four Jewish patients, and by their side, each had an aide, who very graciously joined in our ceremony. As we started to move through the prayers, it was the gentleman, who had been so explosive and so-called chaotic, who was holding the cadence of our prayers, who was davening, as we say in Judaism, moving and swaying with his body
11:57 Speaker 02 and with the lyrical music of his voice, holding our collective prayer.
12:11 Speaker 02 He was far from chaotic. He was our spiritual leader and guide. The woman, who had struggled so deeply with shame and guilt and depression, perked up and said, "I want to say something. I've always known that at Yom Kippur, we can ask for forgiveness. But sitting here with all of you reading these prayers, I realized that we can be forgiven." All around the table, whatever had caged in their soul was superseded by the radiance
12:54 Speaker 02 in this moment of their spirit. It was extraordinary.
13:15 Speaker 02 And so I realized, Shankar, that something was happening in a spiritually grounded religious ceremony that was not happening in treatment as usual. Once the word got out that Dr. Miller talks about spirituality, patients who weren't even my own patients would pull me over to the corner. One woman, who I happened to be Jewish, she happened to be Catholic, turned to me one day and said, "Dr. Miller, I have some very heavy news. They will be sending me away upstate," which means no longer will she be living in Manhattan, struggling through the revolving door of treatment, but is really being sent away. She said, "Will you come with me? I need to talk to you."
13:58 Speaker 02 And "come with me" meant walk down the hall, leave the offices, enter the kitchen, go way, way back into the pots and pans closet, and there in the way, way back, "Dr. Miller, will you pray with me before I'm sent upstate?" We prayed she in her way, I prayed in my way, and what I saw was a great peace and a comfort coming over her. I didn't know how to pray her way, but I knew how to be with her in a common state of spiritual love and support. The next day I showed up, Shankar, her bed was made, she was gone. I shared this story with one of the unit chiefs, who's a very good person and was,
14:42 Speaker 02 I think, trying to speak in my best interest. The unit chief said, "What you did was beautiful. It was completely right. Don't ever tell anyone you did that." There was a sense that somehow spirituality doesn't belong here. Psychotherapy, mental health treatment, is medical, so-called biological. What is this sort of airy-fairy, indeterminate, unmeasurable, otherly thing of spirituality?
15:21 Shankar Vedantam? Lisa, I understand that going home from work from this inpatient psychiatric unit, you noticed people in the subway. Now, these people were not clinically ill, but you felt that in their own way, they were also not healthy?
15:37 Speaker 02 Shankar, once we see in its intense, most grueling form, mental illness, whether it's a deep depression or profound anxiety. As a therapist, it's been very easy to eyeball the subway, be at a dinner party, and see a whiff of that depression or anxiety. So when I left the inpatient unit and just about every day, I'd ride home on the subway and see on people's faces and in their countenance what weighs on them. But one day, Shankar, I saw a gentleman whose eyes were bright like the sun.
16:20 Speaker 02 He wasn't smiling across his mouth, but there was a joy through him. He was an Orthodox Jew, probably Habad. And I could see that he was davening. He was praying, right there on the subway. I felt the illumination. I felt the joy that I'd seen in the patients on the inpatient unit during our Yom Kippur service. And in this sort of struggle of more suffering than we really need to have in our lives on the subway, in a restaurant, in the coffee shop, I saw what was equal and opposite to the suffering. And it was the illumination of spiritual awareness and connection.
17:06 Shankar Vedantam? I understand, Lee said, that in your own personal life, you and your partner had occasion to examine what you yourselves were doing. You had been focused on getting good educations and launching your careers. And from the outside, anyone could look at your lives and say, you know, here's a couple that's really made it. But I understand that from time to time, you would look at each other and ask, is this really all there is?
17:31 Speaker 02 After years and years of hard work, my husband and I, for years and years, he had gone to law school and then worked in a law firm. I had gotten my PhD and then worked in clinical and research settings. We worked, you know, not 60 hours, probably more. We were more like the 70, 80 hour a week type. Driven by good things. We weren't overly obsessed with money. We were driven by the purpose of our work, the mission of our work. But I'd say that there was a lopsidedness. We were getting a little narrow in our focus. And the people we loved very much, who were so kind, we could turn to in a moment of loss or pain,
18:14 Speaker 02 good friends, lived in the same culture with us. So our dinner parties would have a lot of talk about, you know, well, once I make partner or if we can move over from Second Avenue to Lexington, or, you know, there's a promotion coming up or I'm moving from a two to a three bedroom. There was sort of, almost a low-grade monopoly game going on that was narrowly achievement oriented. And it felt empty as a tin.
18:49 Shankar Vedantam? So Lisa, there is a clinical term called dysthymia. What does it mean?
18:55 Speaker 02 Dysthymia is a low-grade, nagging, haunting, sort of like a milquetoast gray depression. It's a dissatisfaction and hedonia where things don't delight us. We fail to experience the full delight of life. Dysthymia is quite prevalent. It's very prevalent in young people. If we don't like our job, if we haven't found our deeper path. Dysthymia is a low-grade depression that lingers and lingers and even becomes livable. So it becomes a normal, low-grade pain or disengagement.
19:40 Shankar Vedantam? I mean, in some ways, you were seeing it on the subway. You were seeing it at your dinner parties with your friends.
19:45 Speaker 02 Yes, it's very easy to try to override the emptiness of dysphymia through a promotion or a new apartment or a vacation. But dysphymia runs deeper than the outward markers of achievement in the monopoly game. Dysphymia is, you could say, a hole in the heart, a hole in the soul. It is a yearning for a deeper connection in life.
20:21 Shankar Vedantam? In her work with patients and in her own social world, Lisa was seeing that the conventional approaches to achieving a good life were falling short.
20:30 Shankar Vedantam? When we come back, exploring possibilities that lie beyond the material and the practical. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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22:19 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Modern science has given us astonishing tools to map the brain, sequence the genome, and analyze the body's chemistry. Many scientists interpret these advances as proof that life is nothing more than matter in motion. At Teachers College, Columbia University, psychologist Lisa Miller is interested in the possibility that the human brain is built to have a spiritual dimension to it. For many years now, she has deployed scientific methods to study this aspect of the mind.
23:00 Shankar Vedantam? Lisa, both your psychological training and the culture at large gave you a model of human existence, a notion that we're all just billiard balls bouncing off each other. Unpack this metaphor for me.
23:14 Speaker 02 Shankar, coming through graduate school, training as an intern, I learned the models of the time for treatment of depression, treatment of anxiety, were really radical materialist models, which means that the brain is effectively an atomistically sealed brain, like a brain in the box. The depression had biological correlates.
23:43 Speaker 02 That needed to be treated with medicine, but also that psychotherapy silent on spirituality, reworking life experience would also shift. And there was evidence of this shift the brain. But spirituality or spiritually infused religion was viewed as something outside of the medical establishment. It was separate from the biology or the neural mechanisms of the human condition. And so what I had witnessed on Unit Six in the hospital, on the inpatient unit in New York City,
24:26 Speaker 02 said to me, no, no, the spiritual life is part of the same person who is recovering from depression because the illumination was so strong. So I set sail for 30 years of science, MRI studies, long-term clinical course studies, epidemiological studies, genotyping studies, you name it, any lens or set of collaborators with whom I could work to ask the question, where is spiritual awareness in the composition of the whole person? And how might spiritual awareness be healing and even protective against the most prevalent forms of suffering?
25:19 Shankar Vedantam? What I find fascinating about your work, Lisa, is that you are trying to marry together these two parts of yourself. You're interested in the world of transcendence and you're also interested in scientific measurement. And you're trying to understand this dimension of our lives using scientific techniques. One of the dimensions of your research has linked spiritual experience to specific neuroanatomical and neurophysiological markers. Tell me a little bit about this work.
25:51 Speaker 02 So Shankar, just as there are neural correlates for depression or anxiety, just as there's neural correlates for hunger or craving or thirst.
26:03 Speaker 02 It turns out that there are neural correlates for spiritual awareness. Now, if you think about it, it would seem to make sense that we all have a common visual system. We all have a common auditory system through which to perceive. And it turns out, through now fifteen years of MRI studies, we all have a common set of circuits through which to perceive the transcendent. Now, it doesn't matter if I am Hindu, or Jain, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Catholic, or Christian, or spiritual and not religious. We all share the same core neural circuits of transcendent awareness.
26:45 Speaker 02 Of course, as in any form of perception, there's human variability in the intensity or in the nuance with which we experience perception. Shankar, what's extraordinary is that perception of the transcendent calls on the same neural circuits, no matter what tradition I may be, or even if I am spiritual but not religious. What are those circuits? Well, there are four. The first, and only the first, is associated with quieting the mind. It's shared, of course, with mindfulness, the disengagement of the default mode network, the racket that spins round and round.
27:25 Speaker 02 But mindfulness, as helpful as it is to bringing us present, presence alone is not sufficient for transcendent awareness. Presence is perhaps the threshold of the door through which we might then cross to experience transcendent awareness. And there are three circuits on the other side of the door, seen in all people of all faith traditions at a moment of transcendent connection. First, the bonding network comes up online, the same bonding network engaged when we are babies in our parents' or grandparents' arms, through which we feel and know that we are loved and held.
28:15 Speaker 02 The universe, God, Hashem, Allah, Jesus, whatever one's sacred word loves and holds us. We are absolutely held. That is not a belief. That is a perception. It is a felt perception. The second circuit to come online is attentional. We see a shift from the very narrow, top-down dorsal attention. Why did I say that? What's going to happen next? Am I going to get fired? Did the check bounce? What could I have done differently? The narrow assumption of radical control. What do I want? How am I going to get it?
28:58 Speaker 02 Yields and gives way to the ventral attention network, where suddenly the lights come back on. There's a broad landscape before us. And we ask, what is life showing me now? At which moment, many people say, a new direction pops. A door never seen before opens. An inspired sense of guidance. We are loved and held. We are guided. We are guided. And third, we are loved and held. We are guided. And the parietal that puts in and out hard boundaries, that lets us know, Shankar, that you sit in one city and I sit in a sister city. That we each have our exquisitely beautiful,
29:43 Speaker 02 diverse bio-body suits. We have different GPS coordinates. We are a point and we are a wave. We are distinct and beautifully diverse. And we are part of one unit of whole, one family of life. Loved, held, guided, and never alone. Loved, held, guided, and never alone moves together. These three circuits move together. It's not that we're loved, but we're not guided, or we're guided, but we're not. The awakened brain moves together with these three circuits. Everyone on earth has the capacity to be in a deep, transcendent relationship through which they know the deeper force in life.
30:34 Shankar Vedantam? I understand that in your brain imaging studies, you find changes in cortical thickness in people who are especially spiritual.
30:43 Speaker 02 Every human being on earth is born with a natural capacity for spiritual awareness. We know this through twin studies. We can look at twins raised together, twins raised apart, and factor out commonalities of function of shared environment, shared genes. So, for instance, temperament is about half innate, half environmentally formed. IQ is about two-thirds innate, one-third environmentally formed.
31:12 Speaker 02 The capacity through which we experience transcendent relationship is innate. It is one-third innate. Every single one of us is born with the natural neurocircuits for transcendent awareness. But one-third innate, two-thirds environmentally formed means that our parents and grandparents, the 10,000 exchanges at school, our pastor, priest, and monirabbi, our relationship to nature. And as we get older, we choose our environment, both outer, the company we keep, the service that we offer or not to our world, and the inner environment, whether I meditate, whether I pray,
31:57 Speaker 02 whether I reflect or read sacred transcendent text. Two-thirds environmentally formed means that, yes, we are all naturally spiritual beings, but we have the opportunity of our lifetime to cultivate our spiritual awareness. When we do, we see literally a thicker cortex across the regions of the awakened brain. Sustained spiritual life, prayer, meditation, service, right action, often within a faith community, often service outside a faith community. Sustained spiritual life is associated with cortical thickness
32:39 Speaker 02 across the regions of the awakened brain. Now, by sustained spiritual life, in this study, which we published in JAMA Psychiatry, we looked over eight years. People who sustained a strong spiritual life, who said, "My personal spiritual life is highly important to me," over eight years, showed a thicker cortex across the regions of the awakened brain.
33:02 Shankar Vedantam? Hmm.
33:03 Speaker 02 Shankar, what makes this particularly helpful, as we think back to Unit Six, is that when we sustain our spiritual life, the cortical thickness is seen across the regions, the very same regions, that are not thick but thin, in people with recurrent major depression. People with sustained spiritual lives show cortical thickness across the very same regions that are not thick but thin, if we are struggling with recurrent major depression, which is to say, that spirituality and depression appear to be two sides of one coin.
33:41 Shankar Vedantam? I'm wondering, as you have presented these ideas, how have they been received by your colleagues? You told me that when you talked with your supervisor, you know, back in the day, your supervisor said, "It's nice that you, you know, helped the patients by performing a religious service, but this is not something to put on your resume. This is not something to talk about, because this, in some ways, is antithetical to what we're doing here. We're supposed to be scientists. We're supposed to be medical practitioners." I'm wondering how, as you have accumulated this body of research in the course of your career, how it's been received by your colleagues?
34:21 Speaker 02 When I saw the tremendous impact of spiritual life on ameliorating, on breaking through some forms of suffering and despair, I raised the lens of science, because the language of science, and in fact, the facts of science, are the foundation of medically based mental health. Then, of course, the second reason I've always loved science is because it is jaw-droppingly spectacular to look through the lens of science. So...
34:55 Speaker 02 Shankar, I started publishing in a way that I hoped would speak to the field because out of every 10 variables in an article, nine of them were familiar. I used very tried and true, beloved top-notch data sets. I drew on the variables and the measures that everyone else in the top peer review journals used. I set up the design that was familiar to people. And having effectively replicated nine out of 10 elements of a study, I added one variable, which was, how personally important is spirituality or religion to you?
35:39 Speaker 02 And over time, that item expanded into scales and measures of spiritual life. But I always added one and only one variable, what is the nature of your spiritual life, to a study that otherwise looked very familiar. And in this way, we were able to publish in top peer review journals, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, JAMA Psychiatry, because the studies had the blue housekeeping seal of all the markers that we had come to trust as a field. Reliable measures, familiar statistics, dotted i's, crossed t's, everything was meticulous
36:23 Speaker 02 and in keeping with the field, except for the step of advance spiritual life. Every single article, as you know Shankar, is submitted for peer review. Peer review is conducted blind to who the authors are, so there's no sort of cult of personality, or vogue, or one lab over another. And science also, in the peer review process, requires that two or three scientists within or closely adjacent to the area of inquiry weigh in on the method, weigh in on the conclusions, offer recommendations for expansion of the study.
37:01 Speaker 02 We were able, over now three decades, to publish our lab, often in collaboration with fellow labs, about 200 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. And the field around us has grown. We've tried to be collaborators in building a field as well. But I will tell you, Shankar, that despite the meticulous science in top peer-reviewed journals, because the findings were new, I would say people did not know yet what to do with these new scientific findings. And so, for instance, we published an article that showed that an adolescent with a strong spiritual life, compared to one who doesn't really know
37:45 Speaker 02 what you're talking about, was 80% protective against onset of addiction. 80% protective, who wouldn't want that for their child? And yet, when I presented these findings, published in the top journal for children and adolescents, there was an utter silence and confusion. A couple people left. They got up and walked out in the middle of grand rounds, later to share, well, what does that have to do with mental health? What does that have to do with psychology? But most people were just confused. The paradigm at the time didn't have a place for what on earth is going on? And so, you know, good people, good healers, were confused.
38:30 Speaker 02 And a lot of this just sort of, you know, dropped silence for a while. And then culture started to change. New residents came, new psychologists came. And in the rising generation, there was more curiosity and perhaps a stronger sense of personal spiritual quest. And I saw residents light up, oh, you want to talk about spirituality? Or to sign a book or offer an article? And the room felt liberated. The rising generation wanted to talk about spirituality and felt free. There were plenty of good spiritual people who were seeing her, but perhaps didn't feel free to speak their heart about spirituality.
39:30 Shankar Vedantam? I'm wondering, Lisa, whether some of the resistance comes from the fact that there are many claims that people make about religion and spirituality that, in fact, are not scientific claims. Many people who are making claims on behalf of religion or spirituality have not done the empirical work that you have done. And so perhaps there's a knee-jerk reaction among scientists to say, anything that smacks of spirituality must, by definition, not be scientific.
39:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, Shankar, one of the most important findings was put forward in 1997, replicated in 1999 by Ken Kedler at Virginia Commonwealth. And what Kedler identified was that spirituality is innate. It is one-third innate, two-thirds environmentally formed. Religion is environmentally transmitted, almost entirely. So there's enormous confusion in a country where, for 40 years, there has effectively been an ice age on spiritual and religious discourse in the public square, where people in the classroom
40:42 Speaker 02 or boardroom or at a dinner party don't know how to talk about spiritual or religious life without imposing or don't know where the line is. There's a tendency to simply shut down. So in that context, I have found, in the 10 years I've spent sharing the science on spiritual life, resilience, and mental health, I have seen enormous confusion, Shankar, over the difference between spirituality and religion. Through the lens of science, religion is a gift of our parents and grandparents. We might choose a faith or tradition and immerse ourselves. Religion is environmentally transmitted. Spirituality is innate. The capacity for a transcendent relationship
41:27 Speaker 02 is tracked by discrete and specific neural circuits that are universal in every human brain. So now, when I'm asked, hey, you know, what about the fact that people have done all these bad things in the name of religion? I can say, well, my question as a scientist is, are they acting in a way that is consistent with natural spirituality? Is this person conducting themselves in such a way that is consistent with being loving, guiding, and never leaving anyone alone? So if I hear a comment, hey, wait a minute.
42:09 Speaker 02 How can you say spirituality is so good when all these bad things have been done in the name of religion? I say, well, is the practice of that so-called religion consistent with natural spirituality? Are they being loving, guiding, and not leaving anyone alone?
42:39 Shankar Vedantam? When we come back, what science shows us about the effects of spirituality on our mental and physical health. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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44:38 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you had experiences in your life when you felt helped or hindered by your own spirituality? If you have a personal story that you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, or a question or comment about Lisa Miller's research, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at [email protected] using the subject line "Spiritual." Again, that's [email protected] .
45:17 Shankar Vedantam? Lisa Miller is the author of The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life. Lisa, you found that an engagement with a personal spirituality is associated with improved stress resilience and faster physiological recovery. How do you think spirituality protects us against the psychological and physiological effects of stress?
45:42 Speaker 02 There are multiple pathways through which spirituality protects us against physical and mental illness. First off, the most remarkable finding in science is the scale, the magnitude, at which spirituality protects against some of the most prevalent forms of suffering. The number one cause of death right now to rival auto accidents is suicide in Gen Z, in high school, in college. A strong personal life, when shared, shared in the sangha, the mingin, the fellowship amongst friends
46:23 Speaker 02 or family, is 82% protective against completed suicides, four fifths less likely to take our life. So if I told you, Shankar, there's a little pill, and you can pick up this little pill at Walgreens or the CVS at the drugstore, and it will protect your child, your grandchild, all the students in your classroom, four fifths against the leading cause of morbidity, of death in young people, who wouldn't give that to their child?
46:54 Shankar Vedantam? I understand that you and others have found that having a spiritual side to one's life is associated with greater well-being and life satisfaction. Do you think this is connected to those three things you talked about earlier, that people with a spiritual side feel like they are held, that they are guided, that they are notured?
47:13 Speaker 02 Precisely. We walk on an entirely different landscape. We walk on sacred landscape when we open the aperture and let in the light through our awakened brain. Life unfolds in an entirely different way. Life moves from, what do I want? And how am I going to get it? Really, quite a transactional way of life. And by the way, who are you? How are you going to help me get what I want? Relationships of transaction. What I call narrow achieving awareness. Out of that narrow rut to, hey, okay, I just didn't get what I wanted. I didn't get the job. My kid didn't get into the college.
47:55 Speaker 02 Hey, what is life showing me now? We move from, what do I want? And how am I going to get it? And what did I do wrong? And how could I get it next time? To, wait a minute. What is life showing me now? What is the universe directing? What am I being asked to do? Am I being asked to love more deeply? Am I being asked to listen to those with whom I work or my children? Am I being given an opportunity to serve? The life that is before us is so much bigger and full of portals and possibilities than we could a priori have spun or cooked up in our mind.
48:37 Speaker 02 In other words, when we can release the stranglehold of our expectations and plans and be less hardcore makers of our path, creating space to be discoverers of our journey, life unfolds in extraordinary ways. It is beyond what we might have imagined. In other words, when I can move from narrow achieving awareness to open up a relationship, a dialogue with life, I can be guided in places I didn't even know existed. I can find a job that I didn't even know was a job. I can meet someone at a party that I wouldn't have spoken to because they didn't meet my
49:21 Speaker 02 a priori criteria of a date. But if I'm open, why is the universe introducing me to this person now? I can discover a relationship I've never dreamed of. That's a much bigger life. That is an inspired life.
49:49 Shankar Vedantam? So Lisa, you've made a couple of references in this conversation to the distinction between an achievement-oriented brain and an awakened brain. Can you talk about this distinction for a moment? It's a central portion of your research career these past few decades.
50:07 Speaker 02 Shankar, every one of us...
50:10 Speaker 02 Has a capacity for two types of reasoning. On the one hand, we have achieving awareness, the ability for strategizing, tactic, research, empiricism. Achieving awareness is extremely helpful at laying out a plan. And we come to achieving awareness with a great deal of practice. We learn in school. The first thing I ever received on my desk in first grade, right there in the center of my first grade desk, was a planner. Right? In school, I learned to plan, to organize, to some extent, to control. Achieving awareness has tremendous instrumental value. It helps us pay the rent.
50:54 Speaker 02 Achieving awareness helps us move through a scientific problem. But achieving awareness alone is utterly insufficient for a meaningful life. Achieving awareness will get us on the A train, and it might send us flying at great speeds. But when we disembark, we may not even know where we are. This is what we learn in school, how to do. But we all are also endowed with another form of perception, our natural awakened awareness.
51:33 Speaker 02 Awakened awareness is the capacity to perceive through intuition, perhaps a mystical experience. Awakened awareness is a receptive form of perception. Awakened awareness asks the question, what is life showing me now? What did I just perceive? That whisper of a hunch? We need both. Awakened awareness sets our north star. Awakened awareness sets our true direction. Achieving awareness rolls out the plan, how to get there. The problem in our contemporary culture is that very often, we are highly versed and practiced in achieving awareness, but we don't know where we're going because we've
52:18 Speaker 02 yet to find our guiding star through our awakened awareness.
52:32 Shankar Vedantam? Lisa Miller is a psychologist at Teachers College Columbia University. She's the author of The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life. Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
52:47 Speaker 02 What a joy, Shankar. I so enjoyed connecting with you. Thank you.
52:55 Shankar Vedantam? Have you had experiences in your life when you felt helped or hindered by your own spirituality? If you have a personal story that you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, or a question or comment about Lisa Miller's research, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at [email protected] using the subject line "spiritual." Again, that's [email protected] .
53:28 Shankar Vedantam? Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.
53:46 Shankar Vedantam? Our unsung hero today is Pablo Voiteler. Pablo is a video and digital media producer at Stanford University. A few weeks ago, I was at Stanford for a stop on Hidden Brain's live tour. I needed to record some audio for the show, and Pablo helped me out at a studio at the Stanford Business School. Thank you, Pablo.
54:09 Shankar Vedantam? If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to share it with a friend or a family member. You never know who might find the ideas in an episode like this valuable at a difficult point in their lives. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
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Previous Stepping Out of the Shadows Next Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 2 Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated