Psychologist Lisa Miller
speaker
353 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 29 Jun
Psychologist Lisa Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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-reviewed journals used.
I set up the design that was familiar to people.
And having effectively replicated nine out of ten 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.
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, cross T's, everything was meticulous and in keeping with the field guidelines.
Except for the step of advanced 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.
Showing 221–240 of 353 · page 12 of 18
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