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

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– Original Music provided by [Felix Bird](http://2014.felixbird.com/)

– Audio Production by [Chris Mo — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lessdoing/message