Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

**Shankar Vedantam** (0:00)
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Thomas Hood was a 19th century English poet known for his elegant, often melancholy verse. His 1826 poem, I Remember, I Remember, captures a feeling that is familiar to many adults, especially its wistful last lines. I remember, I remember, the fir trees dark and high. I used to think their slender tops were close against the sky. It was a childish ignorance, but now there's little joy to know I'm farther off from heaven than when I was a boy. Thomas Hood's poem gestures to the reality that as grownups, many of us lack the effortless sense of connection and awe that we felt as kids. Was that intimate bond with the universe merely an illusion of childhood, or a real measurable human capacity that we can access as grownups?
Researchers are investigating the ways that we can preserve or revive the sense of being close to the sky that Thomas Hood so tenderly evoked.
This week on Hidden Brain, we explore what it means to feel closer to heaven, and the value of looking for transcendence in our busy, bustling lives.
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These days, we are encouraged and even exhorted to optimize every aspect of our lives, our bodies, our relationships, our productivity. But what about the parts of us that yearn for meaning, for understanding, for wisdom? Those aspects of ourselves are often ignored in our tireless pursuit of worldly rewards. At Columbia University, psychologist Lisa Miller studies the science of transcendence. Lisa Miller, welcome to Hidden Brain.

**Lisa Miller** (3:43)
I'm so grateful to be here. I appreciate so much your show, the way you go deeper, the way you open up the double door in our life. So Shankar, thank you for having me.

**Shankar Vedantam** (3:54)
Lisa, early on in your career as a psychologist, you treated a young woman named Ileana. Can you describe her for me and tell me what brought her into your clinic?

**Lisa Miller** (4:06)
Shankar, Ileana was only 12 years old. She was in middle school. This was in New York. And she came in one day all by herself to the clinic. Generally, of course, young people are accompanied by a grandparent or a parent. Someone breaks them. This little girl was hunched her arms wrapped tight. And when I invited her in to say, what has brought you here? The first thing she said was, two men had walked into her father's store. Her father owned a corner deli. Two men who he knew had walked into his store, robbed him and then taken his life.
Her father was her son, her moon, her stars. She was devastated. Ileana was beyond bereft. She could barely move through the day.
But equally, she was living in her new setting with her mother and her mother's mother. Both women had escaped themselves, very perilous and painful situations. And they were quite understandably guarded. It had yet to benefit from therapy. So in this setting, Ileana was really basically on a lockdown, a social lockdown. She wasn't allowed to go out and see friends. She wasn't allowed to go to the school dance. She'd gone from being the apple of her father's eye to living in a very cold, restrictive environment. The treatment of the day would suggest help her renegotiate her condition, help her make sense of what had happened, address the trauma, the brutality of her father's death and the wrongness, the moral and spiritual injury of her father's death. But all of the treatment as usual was not moving the needle. I mean, every day that a patient comes into the clinic, we do a quick assessment, one to 10, how are you? And she was never above a five. It was a four, it was a three, it was a five, never above a five.