THE AWAKENED BRAIN

A compelling examination of the correlations between spirituality and mental health.

“This book is the story of how I discovered the awakened brain, why it matters, and how we can cultivate it in daily life,” writes clinical psychology professor Miller, founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia. In a landmark 2012 study, she demonstrated that spirituality contributes to preventing depression. Participants, all at genetic risk for depression, were asked how personally important spirituality or religion were to them; subsequent MRI scans showed that “the high-spiritual brain was thicker and stronger in exactly the same regions that weaken and wither in depressed brains.” Miller critiques popular psychological treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, as bound by limiting assumptions. In 1998, when she presented her epidemiological research to colleagues, she was met with skepticism. The overwhelming majority of scientists “accepted that biology was real, and spirituality was not real.” The author has spent much of her career addressing this dichotomy by evidencing a biological basis for spirituality. She interweaves stories of her own struggles with depression and infertility into her professional findings. Her work shows depression and spirituality as two sides of the same physiological coin and that engagement with awakened attention and connection is “a matter of choice.” Every human, she notes, “is endowed with a natural capacity to perceive a greater reality and consciously connect to the life force that moves in, through, and around us.” When we put that capability to good use, we access “unsurpassed psychological benefits: less depression, anxiety, and substance abuse; and more positive psychological traits such as grit, resilience, optimism, and tenacity.” Miller’s 2016 study of 5,500 participants representing the most popular global religious traditions revealed “that people shared five spiritual phenotypes,” including altruism and sense of oneness. With a more definitive way to ascribe meaning to spirituality, the author examines which phenotype is most effective in thwarting depression.

Potent, profound, and accessible.