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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Hidden Brain · Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1 · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

If we don't like our job, if we haven't found our deeper path,

So dysthymia is a low-grade depression that lingers and lingers and even becomes livable.

So it becomes a normal low-grade pain or disengagement.

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.

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.

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 6 in the hospital, on the inpatient unit in New York City, said to me, you know, 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 research.

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?

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.

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