My BrainWise Coach

Phil watched something happen on a tennis court at Apple in the late 1980s that he could not explain for thirty years. Complete beginners were rallying inside forty minutes, and the coach, Tim Gallwey, never once told them where to put their feet. The neuroscience has finally caught up, and it turns out Gallwey was working around brain architecture nobody had imaged yet. Visit brainwiseenterprises...

A new study in The BMJ puts a hard number on something researchers have chased for years. At least one in four former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE at the time of death, and that is the most conservative reading of the data, not the likeliest one. Cole and Phil walk you through where that number comes from, why it reaches well past American football, and what is actually happe...

You have carried a belief about yourself since childhood that someone else handed you, and you have probably never tested it. Phil Dixon has spent years watching one of those beliefs come apart in about ninety seconds, using nothing more than an orange and a single change of instruction. This episode walks you through exactly what happens in the brain when that belief falls, and why the mechanism...

Your friend is quiet at lunch, and by evening you are certain she is upset with you. A landmark study out of Columbia, published in Nature Medicine this month, traces that exact experience down to a stalled process inside a single region of your hippocampus. Phil and I read the paper carefully so you can understand what it actually shows and what it does not. Learn more, get certified, take your P...

You take a personality assessment, read the results, and think yes, that's me. Six months later you land in the exact situation it warned you about and respond exactly the way it predicted, having changed nothing. Phil and Cole unpack the neuroscience behind that gap, and why a description of what you're like is a fundamentally different measurement from a map of what your brain is most al...

A visionary founder shares a brilliant idea, someone asks a reasonable clarifying question, and the meeting falls apart. You have probably watched this happen, or lived it from one side or the other. Cole Bastian and Phil Dixon explain why the pattern is neurologically predictable rather than anyone's fault, and hand you seven tools that work with the founder's brain instead of against it....

Your best ideas rarely show up at your desk. They arrive in the shower, on a run, in the car, at the exact moment you stop trying to solve the problem. A brand-new Emory study explains why, and the answer is that the most sophisticated part of your brain is often the thing standing in your way. Learn more, get certified, take the Personal Threat Profile (PTP), and book personalized 1:1 coaching at...

You walk in after a brutal day, and before you say a word your dog is already there, doing the specific thing they do when something is wrong. You assume you are projecting. Four peer-reviewed studies say you are not. Learn more, get certified, take the Personal Threat Profile (PTP), and book 1:1 coaching at brainwiseenterprises.com. Hernández-Pérez and Cuaya's 2026 iScience study at the Unive...

In 2012 Amy Cuddy tells a TED audience that two minutes of open posture rewires your hormones. Three years later a bigger study finds nothing, and the original lead author publicly abandons her own finding. The question buried under that wreckage finally gets asked properly. Learn more, get certified, take the Personal Threat Profile (PTP), and book 1:1 coaching at brainwiseenterprises.com. Carney...

Three peer-reviewed studies land in Phil's inbox on the same morning, and for once he reads all three on the spot. They share no theme, but they share something underneath. Each one found the brain already doing something it has always done, and we simply had no way to see it until the tools caught up. Learn more, get certified, take the Personal Threat and Reward Profile (PTP), and book perso...

You arrive Monday with a clear plan for the week. By Friday evening your team is at the pub and you are still at your desk, buried under problems that were never yours. In 1974 William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass named that mechanism in a Harvard Business Review article that became one of the magazine's two best-selling reprints ever, and this episode adds the part they could not: why your b...

A Roman emperor writing private notes on the Danube frontier claimed your happiness depends on the quality of your thoughts, not your circumstances. Eighteen centuries later, two Harvard psychologists test that claim with an iPhone app and 250,000 real-time data points. He was right, and the default mode network explains why. Learn more, get certified, take your Personal Threat Profile (PTP), and...

You already know you should lead with your answer. You have been told, trained, and probably convinced. Then you sit down to write the email and bury the point on page four anyway. This episode explains why that happens in your brain rather than in your habits, and why the fix is not more training. Head to brainwiseenterprises.com to learn more, get certified, take your Personal Threat Profile, an...

Twelve people sit in a room. A real decision is on the table, the conversation is substantive, and then the meeting ends and nobody knows what was decided or whether anything was decided at all. That meeting is not dysfunctional. The problem is architectural, and your brain reads it as a threat. Learn more, get certified, take the Personal Threat Profile, and book 1:1 coaching at brainwiseenterpri...

You use the word fair constantly, and your brain does not treat it as one thing. It treats it as four, and each one runs on different circuitry. Phil opens in a room in Prague where the standard human response to an unfair offer simply failed to show up, and that anomaly opens the whole episode. Head to brainwiseenterprises.com to get certified, take your Personal Threat Profile, and book personal...

You caught something today without noticing it. Maybe a colleague's anxiety before the meeting even started, maybe a friend's laugh you could not hold back. Your brain runs a continuous transmission system that broadcasts your emotional state to everyone near you, and you cannot switch it off. Learn more, get certified, take the Personal Threat Profile, and book 1:1 coaching at brainwiseen...

Smart, accomplished people become the worst learners in the room the moment something is their fault. That isn't arrogance and it isn't a character flaw. It's a threat response your brain runs automatically, built by decades of being rewarded for being right. Learn more, get certified, take the Personal Threat Profile (PTP), and book personalized 1:1 coaching at brainwiseenterprises.co...

Cold plunges promise depression relief, anxiety elimination, and a full nervous system reset. Something real does happen in your brain when you hit freezing water. The distance between that neurochemistry and the transformation stories filling your feed is where this conversation lives. Visit brainwiseenterprises.com to learn more, get certified, take the Personal Threat Profile (PTP), and book pe...

You look in the mirror and see something the rest of the room does not. That gap is rarely modesty and rarely simple low self-esteem. It is your brain building a self-model from the worst data it has access to, then calibrating that model against a reference group that may not be real. Head to brainwiseenterprises.com to get certified, take your Personal Threat Profile (PTP), and book personalized...

You hear about every cognitive enhancer on the market. Sleep protocols, cold plunges, nootropics, red light therapy. Psycholinguist Falk Huettig argues the most powerful one is free, ancient, and already sitting on your shelf. Reading changes what your brain can do, including in domains that have nothing to do with language. Learn more at brainwiseenterprises.com, where you can get certified, take...

Your brain kept a secret from science for a century. This week closes the anniversary series with six discoveries that did not exist on the map in 2015, from new neurons in the adult brain to a hippocampus that keeps learning while you are fully unconscious. Each one reshapes how you think about focus, recovery, connection, and the way real change actually happens. You hear how the research now st...

Six things you were told about your brain that turn out to be incomplete. One year into My BrainWise Coach, Phil Dixon and Cole Bastian revisit the claims they made with confidence and look honestly at where the science has moved. Being corrected is not a setback. It makes the picture more interesting, and it changes how you work. You hear: Why Karl Friston's predictive processing framework re...

You tell yourself you will save half the chocolate bar for tomorrow. You already know how that usually ends. This episode breaks down what actually happens in your brain the moment now competes with later, and why the pull of now runs so much stronger than it has any right to. Here is what you get into: The two-system brain model from McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, and Cohen (2004), and why an ava...

Someone you love is upset, and your first instinct is to make them feel better fast. A new study across seventeen countries finds that instinct is not human nature. It is a cultural habit, strong in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and largely absent in South Korea, Japan, India, and China. You walk through the finding, then bring in the neuroscience of empathy to explain why th...

Your child's brain builds its most important circuits during two specific windows, age one and age six. What happens in those windows shapes learning and memory for the next decade, and it matters far more than any screen time headline suggests. You learn what the developing brain builds and what it needs from you. You will learn: The GUSTO birth cohort study from Inserm and the National Unive...