Summary:
In Episode #216 Ari interviews [Dr Daniel Amen](http://www.amenclinics.com/): the man who’s scanned more brains than anyone else in the world. Daniel’s a psychiatrist with a background in medical imaging who believes that the health of your brain is physical, social, and spiritual as well as mental. He’s the author of [The 7 Types of ADD](http://www.additudemag.com/slideshow/61/slide-1.html), and [Change Your Brain, Change Your Life](http://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Brain-Life-Obsessiveness/dp/0812929985). Tune in to learn more about Daniel’s work, and find out how to make your brain function better.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 15:22 – Welcoming Daniel to the show
- 15:43 – Daniel was an infantry medic in Vietnam and retrained as an x-ray technician
- 16:16 – Was inspired by the potential of psychiatry to change people’s lives
- 17:20 – Has developed a database of 120,000 brain scans
- 17:27 – “You’re not stuck with the brain you have...you can make it better”
- 19:00 – How large a part of Daniel’s process is the Spec Scan?
- 20:20 – Health is physical, mental, social and spiritual
- 21:20 – Psychiatry needs to look at damage to the brain as a physical organ
- 22:20 – “I originally trained as a marital therapist”
- 23:30 – Daniel scanned the brains of his most troubled couple: “It helped so much”
- 24:30 – Many problems have physical causes - for instance, toxoplasmosis
- 25:30 – “We should be analysing and rehabilitating criminals...let’s invest in making people effective”
- 26:26 – Daniel started looking at ADD when he was a child psychiatrist
- 27:30 – “All psychiatric illnesses are not single or simple disorders” - like physical symptoms, they have multiple causes and need different treatments
- 30:20 – “Everybody’s ADD is different”
- 30:45 – “I don’t like fighting with people...my colleagues hate what I’m doing and it used to really trouble me.”
- 32:00 – What’s Daniel’s treatment methodology?
- 33:20 – Treatments range from nutrition supplements, to education, to medication
- 35:58 – How much of Daniel’s work is corrective and how much is optimisation?
- 37:05 – Daniel and his wife are starting a new course: “The Brain Warrior’s Way”
- 39:09 – “We’d love to see entrepreneurs get really serious about the health of their brains”
- 30:20– _Top 3 Tips to be More Effective:_
- Improve the quality of your decisions
- Never let yourself get hungry
- Make sure you get 8 hours of sleep every night
- Visit the [Amen Clinics](http://www.amenclinics.com/) website for more information
Key Points:
- When your brain is healthy, you are healthy
- Health is simultaneously physical, social, mental, and spiritual: ‘mental illness’ can have physical or social causes
- You can make your brain function better by making the right decisions: fight to keep it healthy with good nutrition, sleep, and stimulation
- Psychiatric illness, like physical illness, is complicated: different treatments work for different people
Resources Mentioned:
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- [The world's first co-working space](https://hbr.org/2016/04/the-innovative-coworking-spaces-of-15th-century-italy?utm_source=nextdraft)
- [Smooch](https://smooch.io) - Automate responses and customer support
- [Front App](https://frontapp.com) - Aggregate all your messages to one collaborative inbox
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Credits
- Original Music provided by [Felix Bird](http://2014.felixbird.com/)
- Audio Production by [Chris Mo
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