It's Me. Your Brain. | The mind behind your decisions

Virginia Palm | Augment Mind
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It’s Me. Your Brain. is a neuroscience and psychology podcast about decision-making, stress, mental health, brain health, and thinking clearly in a fast-paced, AI-driven world. The show explores attention, emotional regulation, cognitive performance, and how modern work environments shape the way our brains function under pressure. Hosted by Virginia Palm, founder of Augment Mind. Grounded insights into the mind behind your choices - no hacks, no hustle culture.

  1. 3h ago

    Productivity Is Not Learning - Guest Episode with Dr. Adam Gazzaley

    Productivity Is Not Learning What fast AI adoption is quietly costing your brain In 2016, the best-known brain-training app settled with the US Federal Trade Commission over claims it couldn’t back up. At the same time, a neuroscientist in San Francisco was twelve years into the slow, rigorous work that produced the first video game ever cleared by the FDA as a treatment. Same category on the surface. A completely different standard of evidence underneath. Dr. Adam Gazzaley has spent two decades studying attention, and how technology can either fragment it or repair it. In this conversation, Virginia and Adam explore the difference between a product “based on science” and one actually tested, what really happens in your brain when you “multitask” in a meeting, and why his closed-loop approach to training the brain could one day work for a whole team, not just one person. Then they turn to AI: the costs of adopting it at speed that no productivity dashboard shows yet, and what it would take to build AI that makes people think better, not just faster. This isn’t a “screens are bad for you” conversation. Adam uses AI every day. His question is whether a tool leaves us more capable or less, and that is a choice leaders get to make. You’ll learn: How to tell real cognitive science from a well-marketed appWhy multitasking is really switching, and what every switch costsWhat “closed-loop” means, and why it is the ultimate cognitive trainerThree hidden costs of fast AI adoption: verification debt, shrinking cognitive reserve and the loss of cognitive agencyWhy productivity is not the same as learning, and what every CEO should understand before pushing harder on AI If you’ve ever looked up from an AI tool and couldn’t quite remember what you sat down to do, this episode explains what’s happening in your brain when you do. About Dr. Adam Gazzaley Adam Gazzaley, M.D., Ph.D., is the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry, and the Founder & Executive Director of Neuroscape at UCSF. He is co-founder of Akili and JAZZ Venture Partners. He has been a scientific advisor for dozens of companies, filed multiple patents (notably his invention of the first video game cleared by the FDA), authored over 200 scientific articles and delivered over 800 invited presentations around the world. He wrote and hosted the nationally televised PBS special “The Distracted Mind with Dr. Adam Gazzaley,” and co-authored the 2016 MIT Press book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, winner of the 2017 PROSE Award. He is the recipient of the 2015 SfN Science Educator Award and the 2020 Global Gaming Citizen Honor, and was named in Newsweek’s 2021 inaugural list of America’s Greatest Disruptors. Links:Neuroscape: https://neuroscape.ucsf.eduWebsite: https://gazzaley.comBook: The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (MIT Press, 2016)

    Productivity Is Not Learning - Guest Episode with Dr. Adam Gazzaley

  2. 6d ago

    The Pressure Paradox: Why Planning Season Kills the Ideas It’s Asking For

    The Pressure Paradox: Why Planning Season Kills the Ideas It’s Asking For Why the pressure to come up with something new is exactly what keeps new ideas away, in your own brain and in the teams you lead It’s the end of the year, and someone has booked the 2027 planning session. There’s a whiteboard, there are sticky notes, and the request is simple: bring your best thinking. Something new. Something better than this year. And what comes out is next year’s plan. Which looks remarkably like this year’s plan, with bigger numbers. In this episode, Virginia looks at why that happens, and why it isn’t a failure of imagination. Drawing on brain research into the “aha” moment and a study of more than 9,000 diary entries from real project teams, she shows how the pressure of planning season shuts down the very thinking it demands. She then sets out an audit to run before your next planning session, for yourself and for your team. In this episode: What happens in your brain in the second and a half before a new idea arrivesWhy the obvious answer shouts and the new idea only whispers, and how stress decides which one you hearThe surprising finding about how creative people feel under deadline pressure, and what their diaries actually showedMission, treadmill, expedition or autopilot: the four states of a team under time pressureWhy most planning seasons are designed, without anyone intending it, as treadmillsA pre-planning audit for you and your team, before the offsite rather than after it The pressure telling you to come up with something new is the same pressure handing you the old answer. Planning your 2027 offsite or leadership kick-off? Find out how we get your team’s brains in the right mode at ⁠augment-mind.com⁠ Research referenced:Jung-Beeman et al. - Neural activity when people solve verbal problems with insight (PLoS Biology, 2004)Subramaniam, Kounios, Parrish & Jung-Beeman - A brain mechanism for facilitation of insight by positive affect (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009)Amabile, Hadley & Kramer - Creativity under the gun (Harvard Business Review, 2002)

    The Pressure Paradox: Why Planning Season Kills the Ideas It’s Asking For

  3. Oct 4

    Performance Is a Cognitive Sport. So Where's Your Coach?

    Performance Is a Cognitive Sport. So Where's Your Coach? Why the brain you lead with deserves the training, recovery and coaching athletes take for granted An elite athlete walks into competition with a coach on the sideline, a planned recovery and months of mental preparation behind her. A senior leader walks into a Tuesday of high-stakes decisions with a calendar, a coffee and the expectation that she should simply be able to handle it. Both are performing at the edge of their capacity. Only one of them works in a world that treats performance as something to be trained. In this episode, Virginia Palm looks at what sports psychology figured out decades ago about how high performance actually works, and why most workplaces still haven't caught up. Drawing on research showing that mental practice measurably changes the brain, and works best for tasks that depend on thinking and decision-making, she makes the case that leadership is a cognitive sport. She then sets out the signals that coaching yourself is no longer enough, for individuals and for organisations. In this episode: - Four lessons from sports psychology that most workplaces are still missing - Why recovery is part of the training, not a break from it - Why most leaders are learning their hardest skills mid-competition - What a classic piano study revealed about how rehearsal changes the brain, and what it doesn't prove - Why your brain is being trained every day, whether anyone is deciding what for - Four signals you've outgrown self-coaching, and four signals your organisation needs to rethink its training ground Research referenced:Pascual-Leone et al. - Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills (Journal of Neurophysiology, 1995)Driskell, Copper & Moran - Does mental practice enhance performance? (Journal of Applied Psychology, 1994)Toth et al. - Does mental practice still enhance performance? A 24-year follow-up (Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2020) Your brain is being trained every day. The only question is whether anyone is choosing what for. Find out more about brain coaching for leaders and organisations at ⁠augment-mind.com⁠

    Performance Is a Cognitive Sport. So Where's Your Coach?

  4. Sep 27

    Out of Rhythm: What Your Body Clock Is Actually Doing to Your Brain - Guest Episode with Dr. Antonio Di Mauro

    Coffee instead of breakfast. Lunch at the desk, or at four, or not at all. A late dinner, one last look at the inbox, and sleep that clocks the hours but never quite restores. Nothing on paper looks wrong. You're performing. And underneath it, a system that runs on timing is quietly falling out of sync. This episode is about the 24-hour biological clock that governs far more of your performance than most people realise. It controls when cortisol should rise and fall, when your body handles fuel well, and what the overnight window is meant to repair before you wake up. It's also about why the people who look most fine from the outside are so often the ones whose biology tells a different story. In this episode: What your body clock actually governs, beyond jet lag and feeling sleepyWhat a healthy cortisol rhythm looks like across a day, and what sustained pressure does to itWhy when you eat matters as much as what you eatWhat the overnight window is doing hormonally and at the cellular level, and how high performers quietly cut it shortWhy generic advice like "eat better, sleep more, stress less" has limits, and what it looks like to actually know your own system Virginia Palm's guest is Dr. Antonio Di Mauro. Dr. Antonio Di Mauro is Research and Innovation Manager at Chenot corporate in Weggis, where he contributes to the scientific aspects of the company’s future endeavors. Over the past decade, he span across a bench-to-bedside approach in the field of holistic medicine, which is what both his academic path and personal interest is about. Originally from Rome, he lives in Switzerland since a few years where he already collected personal and professional experiences in both the German- and French-speaking regions, enjoying one of the best quality of life environments in the world. Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/antonio-di-mauro-2b410559 It's Me. Your Brain. | The mind behind your decisions.

    Out of Rhythm: What Your Body Clock Is Actually Doing to Your Brain - Guest Episode with Dr. Antonio Di Mauro

  5. Sep 19

    The Confidence Paradox

    Why the people who know the least often sound the surest - and what that costs you as a leader Picture a meeting. Someone speaks with total certainty, no hedging, no "I think," just a flat statement delivered like fact. In that same room, someone else (usually the person who's actually spent years on this exact subject) speaks far more carefully. "It depends." A pause before answering something that looks simple. Most rooms trust the confident one. In the moment, certainty reads as competence. But how sure someone sounds and how much they actually know are not the same thing. That's not a personality quirk. It's a well-documented pattern in how the brain judges its own competence, and once you see it, you can't unsee it in your next meeting, your next hire, your next promotion decision. In this episode, Virginia Palm unpacks the real finding behind David Dunning and Justin Kruger's famous 1999 study — a result that's been badly flattened by internet culture into a joke about incompetent people, when the actual mechanism is far more useful. She traces it into the neuroscience of metacognition, drawing on research from Stephen Fleming and colleagues at UCL showing that judging your own competence and actually being competent run on separate systems in the brain. Then she turns it toward leadership: what happens when confidence gets used as a shortcut for competence in the rooms where you decide who to trust, who to promote, and whose plan to back. You'll learn: What the Dunning-Kruger effect actually shows, and what the popular version gets wrongWhy real expertise often sounds like more doubt, not lessThe specific brain mechanism behind judging your own competence, and why it's separate from being competentHow confidence quietly distorts hiring, promotion, and who gets heard in meetingsA practical way to start reading confidence and competence as two different signals, starting with your next meeting The most confident voice in the room is not always the one who's seen the most. Learning to hear the difference is a skill, and it starts with noticing which one you're currently rewarding. This episode is brought to you by Augment Mind, we explain the biology, measure it in your organisation, and build a roadmap around what we actually find. Learn more at augment-mind.com

    The Confidence Paradox

  6. Sep 9

    What Grit Actually Does to Your Brain - Guest Episode with Dev Aditya

    600 investor calls. 600 no's. At some point in that stretch, most people would take any money, on any terms, just to make the calls stop. Dev didn't. He turned down a term sheet because it would have built the wrong thing, when the wrong money was the only money on offer. Dev Aditya co-founded an AI teacher that ran offline in refugee camps eighteen months before ChatGPT existed, and had to explain what that even meant to people who didn't believe him. He's since built a company operating across 24 countries without VC funding, doing field work in Kenya and Burundi along the way. He's also neurodiverse, and has built deliberate cognitive systems around it, mental rehearsal before he speaks, watching himself back, a kind of hyper-personalised training applied to his own thinking. Describing his ability to pitch any product to any room with ten seconds' notice, he called it "muscle memory, but for the brain." He'd named neuroplasticity without knowing its name. In this conversation, Virginia and Dev trace what six hundred rejections actually do to a brain that keeps going anyway, why sustained motivation isn't willpower in the motivational-poster sense, but a trained connection between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system, and how repeated exposure to difficulty can inoculate the nervous system against a setback rather than break it. They also get into Dev's "muscle memory" moment: neuroplasticity, and the brain quite literally restructuring itself through repeated mental rehearsal - the same mechanism elite athletes have used for decades. This isn't a founder success story, and it isn't a product showcase. It's a conversation about what it costs, neurologically, to build something the world isn't ready for yet, and what's actually happening in the brain of someone who does it anyway. You'll learn: Why sustained motivation isn't willpower and what's happening between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system when someone keeps going after repeated failureWhat "stress inoculation" is, and why six hundred rejections can train a nervous system rather than break itWhy the brain doesn't cleanly distinguish a vividly imagined action from a real one and what that means for mental rehearsal under pressureHow neuroplasticity restructures the brain through repetition, and why "muscle memory for the brain" is biology, not metaphorWhat it looks like to build a cognitive operating system around being neurodiverse, rather than around "overcoming" it If you've ever kept going through a stretch where progress wasn't visible, this episode is about what that's doing to your brain, and why it isn't an accident when it works. About Dev Dev Aditya is an AI expert from London, UK. He led the team at Otermans Institute that built the first Digital Human AI teacher (OIAI), aiming to upskill 750 million learners globally by 2030. His AI teachers have taught in 24 countries, from universities to schools, corporates to marginalised learners directly. He's also developed a specialist teaching and learning LLM, OIMISA-7B. He was awarded by the UK Prime Minister for his work, and named a Young Global Innovator and Under 30 Social Entrepreneur (Mint). Innovate UK recognised his AI research and provided national-level funding. He has previous experience at The Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University of London, and his work now operates across four continents. His latest achievement is converting his AI products to run fully offline on Edge AI, for which he was named Young Innovator of the Year Europe by AIconics at the AI Summit London 2025. His AI system runs Africa's largest and fastest AI literacy programme, mentioned at the UN General Assembly in 2025. Website: https://www.portfolio.oiedu.co.uk/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oiedu/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oiedu19

    What Grit Actually Does to Your Brain - Guest Episode with Dev Aditya

  7. Aug 29

    The Reset You Actually Get: Why September Works on Your Brain - If You Use It Right

    You've just sat back down at your desk. The inbox looks impossible, the calendar's already filling up, and underneath it, a quiet thought: I should be more motivated than this. That story isn't just wrong, it's costing you the exact week your brain is actually on your side. In this episode, Virginia Palm breaks down what's really happening in your brain during the return from a break: why this specific week gives you a real, documented boost in motivation, why that boost quietly expires if you don't use it, why the fog and dread of the first few days back isn't laziness but a predictable brain network processing everything you left unresolved, and why deciding on one thing now works better than planning everything later. Drawing on research tracking Google searches, gym visits, and goal commitments around calendar landmarks, and brain-imaging research on what the mind does when it's not focused on a task, this episode explains why none of this is a willpower problem, and what to actually do about it, especially if people are looking to you to set the tone this week. You'll learn: Why coming back from a break gives your brain a real, short-lived motivation boost, and why most people let it pass without using itThe "fresh start effect": why New Year's Day, birthdays, and returning from a holiday all work on your brain the same wayWhy the fog and dread of the first few days back isn't laziness, but a predictable brain network handing back everything you left unresolvedWhy deciding on one thing now protects it more than waiting to decide later wouldA simple three-question audit to use the reset window before it closes, for you, and for the people you leadThis isn't about forcing a fresh start. It's about understanding the window you're actually in this week, and using it before it closes. 🔗 Learn more about our work at Augment Mind:augment-mind.com

    The Reset You Actually Get: Why September Works on Your Brain - If You Use It Right

  8. Aug 18

    Do you listen to your body, or does it have to shout? - Guest Episode with Barnabás Boross

    Every time your body sends a signal and you push through anyway - stay later, skip the walk, override the tiredness - you're making a quiet decision about which of you is in charge. Most people only notice that relationship when it breaks down. This episode is about what it looks like to build it deliberately, before the breakdown. Barnabás has been moving every single day for thirty years. Not to stay fit, and not through willpower, through something closer to identity. Built from a coach's rule at 14, a decade as a paramedic and air ambulance medic in Hungary, and a period of sustained pressure as a GM through COVID that took his health, his relationship, and his sense of self before it finally got his full attention. He moved to Switzerland chasing balance. He concluded, flatly, that balance doesn't exist, not the way we imagine it. In this conversation, Virginia and Barnabás trace what daily movement actually does to the brain - why the runner's high isn't endorphins (that's the outdated story), how consistent aerobic exercise restructures the cortisol response over time, and what happens structurally to the hippocampus after decades of near-daily movement. This isn't a fitness conversation, and it isn't a story about athletic performance. It's a conversation about the signal your body has been sending, and what it quietly costs when you've learned not to hear it. You'll learn: Why the runner's high is endocannabinoids, not endorphins, and why that changes how you think about stress and recoveryHow consistent aerobic exercise measurably lowers cortisol reactivity, not just in the moment, but recalibrated over timeWhat BDNF does to the brain over years, and why hippocampal volume actually changes with sustained movementThe one rule Barnabás's coach gave him at 14 - and why it's still the most useful thing he's ever been toldWhat "use it or lose it" really means for the ageing brain, and why his mother at 76 still proves it every day If you've ever felt your body saying something before your mind caught up with it - this episode explains what that signal is, where it comes from, and what it means when it goes quiet. About Barnabás Barnabás spent over a decade as a paramedic and air ambulance medic in Hungary before relocating to the UK, where he built a career in private healthcare and became General Manager of a nursing company — a role he held through the COVID pandemic. Now based in Switzerland, he runs his own business in Zurich while maintaining the thirty-year daily movement practice he began as a teenage athlete. He has been Hungarian athletics champion multiple times, competed against adults as a teenager, and runs to work every day.

    Do you listen to your body, or does it have to shout? - Guest Episode with Barnabás Boross
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It’s Me. Your Brain. is a neuroscience and psychology podcast about decision-making, stress, mental health, brain health, and thinking clearly in a fast-paced, AI-driven world. The show explores attention, emotional regulation, cognitive performance, and how modern work environments shape the way our brains function under pressure. Hosted by Virginia Palm, founder of Augment Mind. Grounded insights into the mind behind your choices - no hacks, no hustle culture.

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