The Empowering Neurologist Podcast

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Dr. Perlmutter’s groundbreaking new book, Brain Defenders, is now available for pre-order. Discover how to protect your brain and future health - reserve your copy today at https://www.braindefenders.com.

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What if the future of medicine isn't a smarter doctor, but a thinking partner that can hold your entire biology in mind at once? In this episode, Dr. Don Brown joins me to make the case that AI in medicine isn't a replacement for the clinician. It's an ally capable of seeing patterns no human brain could hold together on its own.

Dr. Don Brown is a physician, computer scientist, and serial entrepreneur whose last software company sold for $1.4 billion in 2016. He returned to graduate school in his mid-50s to study biotechnology at Johns Hopkins, founded Lifeomic in 2017, and now leads Bioscope, a platform that uses AI to integrate a patient's entire biological picture into one dynamic view of health.

We dig into why fragmented medicine fails at prevention, how Bioscope ingests the whole genome, microbiome, epigenome, and medical records into a single synoptic view, the real case where AI flagged arsenic toxicity in a patient misdiagnosed with restless leg syndrome, and what it looks like when AI personas begin guiding patients through their own protocols in real time.

00:00 - Introduction 
00:53 - A New Way to Think About Brain Health: Brain Defenders 
03:18 - Welcoming Dr. Don Brown 
06:46 - From Physics to MD to Software Entrepreneur 
09:01 - Back to Grad School at Johns Hopkins 
10:35 - The Lifeomic Years: Cancer Care in the Cloud 
12:34 - The Spark Behind Bioscope 
15:27 - Building the Ultra-Secure Health Data Repository 
16:26 - 40 Hz Light Therapy and Cognitive Decline 
18:26 - The Epigenome: Why Your Genes Aren't Your Destiny 
19:32 - Decoding the Microbiome and Mitochondrial Genetics 
22:25 - What AI Actually Does With Your Health Data 
23:39 - The Synoptic View: Borrowing From Aviation
26:36 - The 15 Dimensions of Health 
29:23 - Why the Patient History Still Matters 
30:23 - Inside the Bioscope Interface 
31:38 - A Real Case: AI Catches Arsenic Toxicity 
33:13 - Personalized Brain Health: 3X4 Genetics 
35:10 - The Driverless Car Moment for Medicine 
37:07 - Marketing to Concierge Physicians 
40:33 - How Patient Data Gets Into the System 
42:30 - Image Analysis and Specialized AI Partners 
45:33 - The Biggest Misconception Patients Have About AI 
47:14 - Meet Lumina: The Physician's AI Persona 
48:00 - Cairo and the Future of AI Health Coaching 
50:13 - Different AI Personas for Patients and Physicians 
51:39 - Why Concierge Doctors Are Mobbing the Booth 
55:00 - Closing Thoughts

___________________________

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Website: https://www.drperlmutter.com/
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🧠 Stay ahead with the latest in science, nutrition, and wellness by subscribing to Dr. Perlmutter’s newsletter at: www.drperlmutter.com. ✉️🌱Thank you to our sponsors:EVY - Go to https://www.optoceutics.com/perlmutter to get $200 off & free shipping (90 days risk-free). 3x4 Genetics - https://3x4genetics.com/DrPerlmutterfor a special offer when you sign up to decode your genetics and get personalized, science-backed health recommendations.====Dr. Perlmutter’s groundbreaking new book, Brain Defenders, is now available for pre-order. Discover how to protect your brain and future health - reserve your copy today at https://www.braindefenders.com.====What if your anxiety, brain fog, and burnout aren't mental health problems, but metabolic ones?In this episode, Dr. Robin Berzin joins Dr. David Perlmutter to make the case that the brain and body are not separate systems, and that treating them as if they are is costing millions of people their health.====00:00 - Introduction00:46 - Brain Defenders: A New Framework for Brain Health03:00 - Welcoming Dr. Robin Berzin05:23 - Why Smart, Motivated People Still Feel Terrible08:37 - From Columbia Med to Founding Parsley Health12:15 - The Problem With 15-Minute Appointments and Stacks of Prescriptions14:37 - What Is Functional Medicine, Actually?17:07 - Precision Medicine: Treating the N of One19:45 - How AI Is Changing the Doctor's Ability to Connect the Dots22:41 - State Change: Shifting Your Mind Through Your Body25:35 - Why Anxiety and Depression Start in the Body27:09 - 40 Hz Light Therapy and Cognitive Decline29:43 - Exercise, Sugar, and Nutrient Deficiencies as Mental Health Levers32:30 - SSRIs as a Tow Truck, Not a Destination34:16 - Psychedelics and Trauma: Tools in the Toolkit36:01 - Metabolic Flexibility and Why Losing It Wrecks Your Hormones38:04 - Sleep, Wearables, and the One Night That Breaks Your Metabolism40:37 - Continuous Glucose Monitors as a Mirror for Your Choices42:19 - 3X4 Genetics: Your DNA Is a Roadmap, Not a Verdict44:37 - Alzheimer's as Type 3 Diabetes: The Metabolic Brain Connection46:21 - The Lab Work Your Doctor Isn't Ordering49:22 - Fasting Insulin, Heavy Metals, and the Tests That Actually Matter51:14 - What's Next: AI, Wearables, and the Future of Functional Medicine53:56 - If You Feel Stuck: Own Your Biological Data55:34 - Closing Thoughts====Dr. Robin Berzin, MD is a functional medicine physician and health tech entrepreneur leading the push to bring root-cause, precision medicine into mainstream healthcare. She earned her MD at Columbia, completed internal medicine residency at Mount Sinai, and trained in functional medicine under the field's top practitioners. Before medicine, she produced the Oprah and Friends Dr. Oz Radio Show, and she later worked in health tech during med school, sharpening her understanding of how digital platforms could expand access to personalized care.Today, she is founder and CEO of Parsley Health, the only national functional and longevity medicine clinic in the U.S., delivering virtual care across all 50 states plus physical clinics in NYC and LA. Under her leadership, Parsley has grown to nearly 30 clinicians and 40 health coaches and nurses, treated over 50,000 patients, and built a team-based, insurance-accessible model that puts functional medicine within reach beyond the wealthy. She also sits on the medical advisory board of Whoop.She is the author of State Change, which challenges the divide between mental and metabolic health and offers a practical framework for transforming mood, energy, and cognition through the body. Her work is widely featured across major health and wellness media, and she is recognized as a defining voice in the future of preventive, personalized medicine.====Instagram: / davidperlmutterWebsite: https://www.drperlmutter.com/Subscribe to our channel:/ @davidperlmuttermd

🧠 Stay ahead with the latest in science, nutrition, and wellness by subscribing to Dr. Perlmutter’s newsletter at: www.drperlmutter.com. ✉️🌱
====
Thank you to our sponsors:
EVY -  Go to https://www.optoceutics.com/perlmutter  to get $200 off & free shipping (90 days risk-free). 
3x4 Genetics - https://3x4genetics.com/DrPerlmutter
for a special offer when you sign up to decode your genetics and get personalized, science-backed health recommendations.
====
Dr. Perlmutter’s groundbreaking new book, Brain Defenders, is now available for pre-order. Discover how to protect your brain and future health - reserve your copy today at https://www.braindefenders.com.====
What if AI isn't on a path to become a better human — but a fundamentally different kind of mind altogether? In this episode, Tom Griffiths joins me to challenge how we think about intelligence itself — and to make a compelling case that AI systems are best understood not as smarter or dumber than humans, but as "alien organisms" solving problems in ways our brains never could.
Tom Griffiths is a cognitive scientist, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton University, and head of Princeton's AI Lab. He is the co-author of the international bestseller Algorithms to Live By and author of the new book The Laws of Thought — an ambitious survey of three centuries of attempts to capture human thinking in mathematics.
We dig into the three mathematical frameworks scientists use to model thought, why a human toddler can learn language from a fraction of the data a large language model requires, what "resource rationality" reveals about mental health and decision-making, and what we stand to lose — and gain — as we increasingly outsource our thinking to machines.
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00:00 - Introduction
00:46 - A New Way to Think About Brain Health: Brain Defenders
05:27 - Welcoming Cognitive Scientist Tom Griffiths
06:04 - The Great Mystery: Can Math Explain How We Think?
08:23 - Three Threads of Cognitive Science: Rules, Networks, Probability
10:17 - Why AI Needs 10,000x More Data Than a Child
12:27 - Intuition Decoded: How Neural Networks Mirror Implicit Learning
15:03 - The Creativity Gap: Why AI Can't Think Outside the Box
18:06 - 40 Hz Light Therapy and Cognitive Decline
20:07 - Inductive Bias: The Evolutionary Head Start of the Human Brain
22:41 - Mental Health Through Three Levels of Analysis
25:25 - Resource Rationality: Why Humans Aren't Actually Irrational
29:33 - Free Will Through the Lens of the Laws of Thought
31:35 - Rethinking Education With Cognitive Science
34:33 - Evolutionary Mismatch: The Mind Meets Modern Technology
37:23 - AI as Alien Intelligence: A New Mental Model
38:04 - Personalized Brain Health: 3X4 Genetics
39:55 - Uncertainty: The Hidden Engine of Human Cognition
43:34 - Bayesian Inference: The Math of "Best Guessing"
44:37 - The Biggest Misconceptions About Intelligence
47:14 - Algorithms to Live By: Optimizing Daily Decisions
49:22 - Five Years From Now: The AI Forecast
51:33 - The Calculator Effect: What Happens When We Outsource Thinking
53:56 - Metacognition: Becoming the Manager of AI
55:34 - Closing Thoughts
====
Instagram:   / davidperlmutter  
Website: https://www.drperlmutter.com/
Subscribe to our channel:
   / @davidperlmuttermd

🧠 Stay ahead with the latest in science, nutrition, and wellness by subscribing to Dr. Perlmutter’s newsletter at: www.drperlmutter.com. ✉️🌱

Thank you to our sponsors:
EVY - https://www.optoceutics.com/perlmutter
and the code perlmutter26 will be auto-applied to your order to get $200 off & free shipping (90 days risk-free).

3x4 Genetics - https://3x4genetics.com/DrPerlmutter
for a special offer when you sign up to decode your genetics and get personalized, science-backed health recommendations.

====

Dr. Perlmutter’s groundbreaking new book, Brain Defenders, is now available for pre-order. Discover how to protect your brain and future health - reserve your copy today at https://www.braindefenders.com.

====

Why is psychiatry the only medical specialty that doesn't look at the organ it treats? In this episode, Dr. Daniel Amen joins me to challenge how mental health is diagnosed and treated — and to make a compelling case that "depression" is as vague a diagnosis as "chest pain."

Dr. Amen is a double-board-certified psychiatrist, 18-time New York Times bestselling author, and founder of Amen Clinics, where his team has performed nearly 300,000 SPECT brain scans — the largest functional brain imaging database in the world.

We dig into what these scans actually reveal: hidden traumatic brain injuries patients never reported, the inflammatory aftermath of COVID, why SSRIs work for some and fail for others, and why the brain you have today is not the brain you're stuck with.

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00:00 - Introduction
01:42 - Psychiatry's Missing Link: The Organ of Treatment
03:22 - The Divergence of Neurology and Psychiatry
05:18 - Beyond Symptoms: Patterns of Brain Health
08:34 - Machine Learning and Autism Insights
10:45 - The Role of the Cerebellum in Thought Coordination
12:46 - The Impact of Undiagnosed Traumatic Brain Injury
14:58 - Reversing Damage: NFL Brain Study Results
16:26 - What SPECT Imaging Reveals About Metabolic Activity
17:38 - COVID-19 and Infectious Causes of Psychiatric Issues
22:11 - Neuroplasticity: Growing a Healthier Brain at Any Age
25:54 - New Technologies: 40 Hz Light and Sound Stimulation
28:27 - Metabolic Health: How Weight Affects Brain Volume
30:25 - Chronic Stress and the Overactive Limbic Brain
31:38 - Predicting Suicide Risk Through Imaging
33:41 - Volunteering and the Default Mode Network
35:01 - Concerns Over Psilocybin and Marijuana Scans
40:12 - Chronic Pain: Breaking the "Doom Loop"
43:12 - Lightning Round: Daily Habits for a Better Brain

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Daniel G. Amen, MD is a double board-certified psychiatrist, clinical neuroscientist, and brain imaging specialist whose pioneering clinical use of SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography) has built the world's largest functional brain imaging database, with nearly 300,000 scans on patients from 155 countries. A graduate of Southern California College (now Vanguard University), Dr. Amen earned his medical degree from Oral Roberts University School of Medicine. His training includes a general psychiatric residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and a child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. Currently, Dr. Amen serves as founder and CEO of Amen Clinics, with eleven locations across the United States, and is the founder of BrainMD and Amen University.

He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a multiple-time New York Times bestselling author whose books have been translated into 50 languages, and the lead researcher on the world's largest brain imaging and rehabilitation study on professional football players. His work has been published in Molecular Psychiatry, Translational Psychiatry, PLOS One, and the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences.

___________________________
Instagram: / davidperlmutter

Website: https://www.drperlmutter.com/

Subscribe to our channel:
/ @davidperlmuttermd

🧠 Stay ahead with the latest in science, nutrition, and wellness by subscribing to Dr. Perlmutter’s newsletter at: www.drperlmutter.com. ✉️🌱

Thank you to our sponsors:
EVY - https://www.optoceutics.com/perlmutter
and the code perlmutter26 will be auto-applied to your order to get $200 off & free shipping (90 days risk-free).

3x4 Genetics - https://3x4genetics.com/DrPerlmutter
for a special offer when you sign up to decode your genetics and get personalized, science-backed health recommendations.

====
Dr. Perlmutter’s groundbreaking new book, Brain Defenders, is now available for pre-order. Discover how to protect your brain and future health - reserve your copy today at https://www.braindefenders.com.
====

Loneliness is no longer a private struggle, it’s a public-health issue that we’ve discussed quite a bit in my recent books. Research increasingly links social isolation to cognitive decline, depression, cardiovascular disease, and shortened lifespan. Yet despite these findings, we rarely explore how to build and sustain meaningful connection in a modern world designed for distraction.

That’s why I invited Barnet Bain to join me on The Empowering Neurologist podcast.
Barnet is a filmmaker, author, and educator whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and lived human experience. You may recognize his work from films such as What Dreams May Come or Milton’s Secret, but his newest contribution may be his most relevant yet.

His book, How to Be a Friend (In an Unfriendly World), is not about social performance or personality traits. It’s about safety, presence, listening, and emotional responsibility, qualities that directly influence nervous-system regulation and mental health.

What makes this work especially important is that it reframes friendship as a skill set rather than a personality trait. Bain shows how fear, shame, unresolved trauma, and cultural conditioning quietly erode our relationships, and how conscious awareness can restore them.

From a neurological perspective, this matters deeply. The brain is a social organ. Connection shapes stress responses, inflammation, cognition, and emotional regulation. Friendship isn’t a luxury, it’s foundational.

This conversation isn’t about having more friends. It’s about being a better one. To others. And to yourself. In a world that feels increasingly fast, cold, and fragmented, this is a conversation worth having.

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00:00 Intro
02:58 Why Friendship Matters for Health and Resilience
06:24 From Columbia to the Practice of Presence
10:41 Friendship as Non-Transactional Love
14:20 The Childhood Stories That Shape the Self
21:39 Ad: Optoceutics
23:39 Projection, Parenting, and Conditional Love
30:08 Friendship as a Crucible for Self-Awareness
35:42 Why Connection Feels Harder in Modern Life
39:03 Safety, Self-Knowledge, and the Ground of Friendship
41:34 Ad: 3X4 Genetics
44:34 Boundaries, Values, and the Meaning of Honor
49:16 Friendship, Self-Forgiveness, and Inner Change
56:25 Presence as the Greatest Gift
58:34 Why Feeling Is Harder Than Doing
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Barnet Bain is a Canadian filmmaker, author, and educator. His film credits include “Milton’s Secret” (director, writer), Oscar winner “What Dreams May Come” (producer), Emmy Award nominee for Outstanding TV Movie “Homeless to Harvard” (executive producer), “The Celestine Prophecy” (writer, producer), and “Jesus,” translated into more than 2,245 languages and often cited as the most widely seen film in history by The New York Times.

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