Proving a Miracle: Unlocking the Power of Prayer to Heal

Diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, a neuroscientist searches for the answer to one of life’s biggest questions: Are miracles real?

After experiencing a violent seizure, Joshua W. Brown was diagnosed with an inoperable glioma—a cancerous brain tumor—just days before his wife gave birth to their first child. As a brain scientist, Josh understood his chances of survival were slim. When science failed him, Josh—the son of a prison chaplain—turned to his faith. He and his wife began to pray, and he discovered a prayer group focused on healing within his church community.

Could prayer really help? Desperate for a miracle, the trained scientist, armed with a healthy dose of skepticism, embarked on a journey of healing that would take him around the globe and lead him to some surprising conclusions: healing can happen outside traditional medicine and in ways that transcend modern scientific explanations. As he navigated his own diagnosis he became convinced that miracles can and do occur regularly—including in his own life: his tumor turned to scar tissue and the seizures ceased.

Combining personal experience and deep research, Proving a Miracle looks at the tangentials of illness and healing, from the placebo effect to the power of positive thinking. Like Lisa Miller’s The Awakened Brain and Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven, Proving a Miracle combines the best rigorous thinking about the connection between science and faith. In chronicling his remarkable experience, Josh pushes us to expand our understanding of the mind/body connection to encompass both faith and community, and how these connections can offer hope for healing.

Joshua W. Brown is a professor of psychological and brain sciences and the former director of the graduate program in neuroscience at Indiana University. He is an internationally recognized expert and leading researcher on the neuroscience of higher cognitive function, and his research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the CIA. His work has been published in Science, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and more. He is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. He has a bachelor’s degree from University of California San Diego in mechanical engineering and a Ph.D. from Boston University in cognitive and neural systems. He is the co-founder and chair of the board of the Global Medical Research Institute, which reviews medical evidence regarding claims of healing through prayer and is developing randomized and controlled clinical trials of healing prayer effects.