Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Thomas Hood was a 19th-century English poet known for his elegant, often melancholy verse. 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. Thomas Hood's poem gestures to the reality that as grown-ups, many of us lack the effortless sense of connection and awe that we felt as kids. Was that intimate bond with the universe merely an illusion of childhood? or a real, measurable human capacity that we can access as grown-ups? 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. 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want. A leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. 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.

I'm so grateful to be here. I appreciate so much your show, the way you go deeper, the way you opened up the double door in our life. So, Shankar, thank you for having me.

Lisa, early on in your career as a psychologist, you treated a young woman named Ileana. Can you describe her for me and tell me what brought her into your clinic?

Shankar, Ileana 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 brings them. This little girl was hunched, her arms wrapped tight. And when I invited her in to say, what has brought you here?

Hmm.

The first thing she said was 2 men had walked into her father's store. Her father owned a corner deli. 2 men who he knew had walked into his store, robbed him, and then taken his life. Her father was her sun, her moon, her stars. She was devastated. Ileana 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, Ileana 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. She'd gone from being the apple of her father's eye to living in a very cold, lonely world. 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, 1 to 10, how are you? And she was never above a 5. It was a 4, it was a 3, it was a 5, never above a 5.

Hmm.

Well, one day she came absolutely skipping it, night and day. It was a whole different presentation clinically. It was as if the lights had been powered back on. And I said, please, please come in, Ileana. Tell me what is on your heart. What has happened? And she said, bouncing in her seat joyfully, she looked me in the eye and she said, you're not gonna believe this. You're not gonna 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 8th grade. And you're not going to believe it. Guess what his name is?

Ileana 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.

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.

I understand that shortly before she went on this dance, Ileana's grandmother had organized a traditional Dominican ceremony to honor her father. Describe the ceremony for me, Lisa. What happened there?

Ileana'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 Ileana was that when they held the ceremony to honor her father with prayers, with candles, with photos, Ileana, 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 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.

I understand, Lisa, 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.

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 were Jewish. 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? 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.

So I understand that You decided to arrange an informal Yom Kippur service on the ward. Describe the scene for me.

Well, I'm not a rabbi, but I did have at that time about 2 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. 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 4 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 and with the lyrical music of his voice, holding our collective prayer. 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 in this moment of their spirit. It was extraordinary.

I knew.

शीघ्रात्नु तियावनु ताइनु तीतानु। 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 happen 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. 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, 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?

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?

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 then very easy to eyeball the subway, be at a dinner party, and see a whiff of that depression or anxiety.

Hmm.

So, but 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. He wasn't smiling across his mouth, but there was a joy through him. He was an Orthodox Jew, probably Chabad. 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.

I understand, Lisa, 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, 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?

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 a week, 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.

Mm-hmm.

And the people we loved very much, who were so kind, we could turn to in a moment of loss or pain, 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 a I'm moving from a 2 to a 3-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.

So Lisa, there's a clinical term called dysthymia. What does it mean?

Dysthymia Dysthymia is a low-grade, nagging, haunting, sort of like a milquetoast gray depression. It's a dissatisfaction, anhedonia, 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.

I mean, in some ways, you were seeing it on the subway. You were seeing it at your dinner parties with your friends.

Yes. It's very easy to try to override the emptiness of dysthymia through a promotion or a new apartment or a vacation. But dysthymia runs deeper than The outward markers of achievement in the Monopoly game. Dysthymia is, you could say, a hole in the heart, a hole in the soul. It is a yearning for a deeper connection in life.

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. When we come back, exploring possibilities that lie beyond the material and the practical. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive Save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on. The versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable All season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. 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. 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.

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.

Hmm.

That depression had biological correlates. 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.

Hmm.

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 6 in the hospital, on the inpatient unit in New York City, said to me, no, 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.

What I find fascinating about your work, Lisa, is that you are trying to marry together these 2 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.

So, Shankar, just as there are neural correlates for depression or anxiety, just as there's neural correlates for hunger or craving, Or thirst. 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 15 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.

Mm-hmm.

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 neurocircuits no matter what tradition I may be, or even if I am spiritual but not religious. What are those circuits? Well, there are 4. 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. But mindfulness As helpful as it is to bringing us present, presence alone is not sufficient for transcendent awareness.

Mm-hmm.

Presence is perhaps the threshold of the door through which we might then cross to experience transcendent awareness. And there are 3 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. 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?— 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, diverse bio-body suits. We have different GPS coordinates. Mm-hmm. 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 3 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 Religion moves together with these 3 circuits. Everyone on Earth has the capacity to be in a deep transcendent relationship through which they know the deeper force in life.

I understand that in your brain imaging studies, you find changes in cortical thickness In people who are especially spiritual?

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 as a function of shared environment, shared genes. So for instance, temperament is about half innate, half environmentally formed. IQ is about two-thirds innate, 1/3 environmentally formed. The capacity through which we experience transcendent relationship is innate. It is 1/3 innate. Every single one of us is born with the natural neurocircuits for transcendent awareness. But 1/3 innate, 2/3 environmentally formed means that our parents and grandparents, the 10,000 exchanges at school, our pastor, priest, imam, rabbi, our relationships 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, whether I reflect or read sacred transcendent text. 2/3 environmentally formed means that yes, we are all naturally spiritual beings, but we have the opportunity of our lifetime Mm-hmm. 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 across the regions of the awakened brain. Now, by sustained spiritual life, in this study, which we published in JAMA Psychiatry, we looked over 8 years. People who sustained a strong spiritual life, who said, my personal spiritual life is highly important to me, over 8 years showed a thicker cortex across the regions of the awakened brain.

Hmm.

Shankar, what makes this particularly helpful as we think back to Unit 6 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.

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 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.

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.

Hmm.

And 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 Shankar, I started publishing in a way that I hoped would speak to the field because out of every 10 variables in an article, 9 of them were familiar. I used very tried and true beloved top-notch datasets. I drew on the variables and the measures that everyone else in the top peer-reviewed journals used. I set up the design that was Mm-hmm. And having effectively replicated 9 out of 10 elements of a study, I added one variable, which was, how personally important is spirituality or religion to you? 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.

Hmm.

And in this way, we were able to publish in top peer-reviewed 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 and in keeping with the field, except for the step of advanced spiritual life.

Hmm.

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 2 or 3 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. We were able over now 3 decades to publish our lab, often in collaboration with fellow labs, about 200 peer review 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 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 the chair— 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. 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. Mm-hmm. 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, wow, you want to talk about spirituality? Or I'd assign a book or offer an article and the room felt liberated.

Hmm.

The rising generation wanted to talk about spirituality and felt free. There were plenty of good spiritual people who were senior, but Perhaps didn't feel free to speak their heart about spirituality.

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.

You know, Shankar, one of the most important findings was put forward in 1997, replicated in 1999 by Ken Kendler. At Virginia Commonwealth. And what Kendler identified was that spirituality is innate. It is 1/3 innate, 2/3 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 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 tradition and immerse ourselves. Religion is environmentally transmitted. Spirituality is innate. The capacity for a transcendent relationship, as tracked by discrete and specific neural circuits that are universal in every human brain, Hmm. 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 Being loving, guiding, and never leaving anyone alone. So if I hear a comment, hey, wait a minute, 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?

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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

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Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel, elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. 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. 2 or 3 minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback@hiddenbrain.org. feedback@hiddenbrain.org using the subject line Spiritual. Again, that's feedback@hiddenbrain.org. 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?

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 Yeah. The number one cause of death right now to rival auto accidents is suicide in Gen Z, in high school and college. A strong personal life when shared, shared in the sangha, the mignon, the fellowship amongst friends or family, is 82% protective against completed suicides. 4/5 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, 4/5 against the leading cause of morbidity, of death in young people, who wouldn't give that to their child?

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 3 things you talked about earlier, that people with a spiritual side feel like they're held, that they're guided, that they're nurtured?

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. 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? 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? 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. 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.

Mm-hmm.

I can meet someone at a party that I wouldn't have spoken to because they didn't meet my a priori criteria.

Mm-hmm.

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.

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.

Shankar, every one of us has a capacity for 2 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. In school, I learned to plan, to organize, to— To some extent, to control. Achieving awareness has tremendous instrumental value. It helps us pay the rent. 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, dark. We may not even know where we are.

Hmm.

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. 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 yet to find our guiding star through our awakened awareness.

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.

What a joy, Shankar. I so enjoyed connecting with you. Thank you.

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. 2 or 3 minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback@hiddenbrain.org using the subject line Spiritual. Again, that's feedback@hiddenbrain.org. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Pablo Voithaler. 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. 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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