Scientific Evidence For A Deeper Way To Live

Book Review: The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller, PhD

Random House, 2021

By Mike Macijeski

Is there more to life? More than just achieving goals, winning status, making money? Lisa Miller’s book answers with a definitive “Yes!”—and marshals convincing evidence, both scientific and personal.

Recently featured on Shankar Vedantam’s Hidden Brain podcast, Miller, a practicing psychiatrist and Columbia University professor, has long been curious about how spirituality affects mental health. As an intern, she realized that the prevailing treatment recommendations of therapy and medication didn’t provide relief for some people. Miller began to wonder whether spiritual practices like prayer, meditation, and service to others might offer restorative benefits not available from standard mental health methods.

Decades of research by Miller and a range of colleagues has yielded powerful evidence that each of us, across all cultural and religious traditions, is designed for spirituality. Aided by modern neuroscience, Miller has identified the parts of the brain that thrive when someone practices personal spirituality—and withers when they do not. Interestingly, they are the same neural networks that impact depression. In fact, the two seem to be opposite sides of the same coin.

Miller advocates a balance between what she calls the achieving brain and the awakened brain. Without using the awakened brain, life feels empty. We miss what the universe or a Higher Power might be trying to tell us. This dichotomy brings to mind Daniel Kahneman’s classic Thinking Fast and Slow, in which he and his late collaborator Amos Tversky demonstrated via clever experiments the two parts of our mind, which they called System 1 and System 2. System 1 is instant, involuntary, and intuitive, while System 2 is slower and logical. Michael Pollan’s recent A World Appears and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink are among other books that also explore the mysteries of how our minds work and perceive things at a level beyond the logical.

The Awakened Brain also features powerful personal experiences from Miller’s practice and personal life, highlighting how being receptive to your awakened brain can provide important guidance for the challenges life throws at us and help us be more effective. Miller rejects the paradigm that science and spirituality are enemies, offering powerful proof that they are in fact intimately united in each one of us, and are both essential to an inspired life.