Dopamine, not brain size or specific genes, is what made us human. Dr. Fred Previck, MD, author of a book on the dopaminergic mind, walks Armand DiMele through how dopamine drove language, working memory, abstract thought, and civilization itself, and why its runaway modern excess now threatens the very societies it built.
The unconscious exists to keep us safe, storing everything from childhood fears to inherited instincts. Armand DiMele and Lisa Arnone, LCSW break down Freud’s id, ego, and superego, using listener responses to Armand’s voice as live evidence of how unconscious associations with safety, kindness, and trust actually work.
Ninety percent of your choices are driven by the unconscious, Armand DiMele argues, and the episode makes that case through vivid examples: a fear of dogs from a forgotten childhood bite, the smell of lilies tied to buried grief, vanilla cake linked to a sister’s rage. Callers test the ideas live, including one who traces his social anxiety to a single humiliating childhood moment.
Armand DiMele and Lisa Arnone, LCSW break down a four-part framework of thinking styles, concrete sequential, concrete random, abstract sequential, and abstract random, showing how each shapes personality, stress responses, and the fit between therapist and client. The conversation ends on trust as the core of healing.
Most people with dyslexia, ADD, and related phobias feel stupid despite high intelligence. Dr. Harold Levinson argues the root cause is inner ear dysfunction, not brain damage, and that treating the cerebellum can lift reading difficulties, phobias, and chronic disorganization at once.
The brain was supposed to be sealed off from the immune system, but new research suggests otherwise. Armand DiMele surveys evidence that bacterial infections, antibodies, and T cells can trigger OCD, depression, memory loss, and personality shifts, and that treating the infection sometimes cures the psychiatric symptom.
Feeling good is not a vague mental state but a precise chemical one, and Armand DiMele breaks down how everything from exercise to eating to orgasm is really the body engineering its own neurochemistry. The episode also reframes feeling good as often just the absence of pain.
Armand DiMele breaks down what ‘crazy’ actually means, separating neurotic repetition (doing the same thing and expecting different results) from chemical and psychological states where a person loses touch with themselves entirely. He traces how fear of danger drives paranoia, withdrawal, and self-destruction.
Jealousy strips away self-awareness faster than almost any other emotion, and Armand DiMele argues that is no accident. He traces the biological roots of jealousy, explains the neuroscience of introspection (gray and white matter in the prefrontal cortex), and shows why even sophisticated people collapse into blame when hormones or threat responses take over.
Psychopaths are charming, fearless, and wired differently. Armand DiMele and Stephanie D’Ambra, LCSW break down the neuroscience behind psychopathy, examining how thinning in the paralimbic system impairs empathy, impulse control, and the ability to learn from punishment, and why that makes the bad boy so seductive.
