The Awakened Brain summary

One morning in 1997, Miller was eating breakfast with her husband while skimming an issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, when an article caught her attention. It was a groundbreaking study by Dr. Kenneth Kendler at the Virginia Commonwealth University, which investigated the relationship between spirituality and mental health in adults.

Miller was astonished by the results. It was the first scientific study to show that spirituality isn’t only passed down through culture, but also embedded in our genes.

Is there a physiological basis for depression? That was the question Dr. Brad Peterson set out to answer when he and his team at Columbia University began comparing brain images of people who were high-risk for depression to those who were low-risk.

They found that high-risk individuals, that is people with a family history of depression, had different brain structures: the outer surface of their right cortex was up to 28 percent thinner.

For years, Miller had tried to get pregnant, first naturally and then through IVF. But to no avail. She began falling into a depression with the growing realization that she may never become a mother.

Then, one day, she came home to find an egg – more specifically, a fertilized duck embryo – on her doorstep. Hoping to save the embryo, she carefully moved it, placing it on the earth, and went inside.

The willow trees bent inward to form a dome and were covered in animal hides. A fire burned inside and filled the inipi with smoke. Within minutes of stepping in, Miller was drenched in sweat and questioning her decision to come.

Still reeling from the pain of childlessness, she’d been invited to this Lakota healing ceremony by her cousin, who worked closely with the Native American community. When it was their turn to share, her cousin asked the women healers to help Miller find her child.

After years of research, Miller was finally piecing together the scientific puzzle of spirituality. First, she found that spirituality protects against depression, addiction, and mental illness.

Then she discovered that our capacity for spirituality is biological and works in the same regions of the brain as depression, but to the opposite effect. She came to understand that spirituality is an integral part of human development and that mental struggle may be the first step in spiritual awakening.

In 1987 at the University of Mexico, a man named Dr. Jacobo Grinberg carried out a series of experiments that began to untangle the mysteries of human connection. He had two subjects meditate together for 20 minutes and found that afterward, their brain wave patterns were in sync.

The meditators were then separated into shielded rooms where they couldn’t see or hear each other. Here, researchers flashed light into one subject’s eyes and measured the corresponding brain wave activity. What they found was that the other subject, in a completely separate room, mentally registered the flashes of light as well, about one-quarter of the time, despite receiving no physical flashes.