Neural Compass

About Neural Compass

If you work in mental health, invest in it, build in it, or just believe it deserves better than it is getting: Neural Compass is for you. Filter episodes by category to find exactly what you're looking for, from AI Meets the Clinic to Founders & Funders to Behavioral Science, right here: https://jiminihealth.com/podcast Every two weeks, Jimini Health co-founder Mark Jacobstein sits down with the scientists, clinicians, and executives who are actually moving the field. The conversations go deep. The guests are the real thing. Episodes have covered the clinical case for ketamine, the genomics of psychiatric diagnosis, what AI can and cannot do for behavioral health, and what it takes to reform mental healthcare from inside the system. Guests have included former National Institute of Mental Health director Tom Insel, Yale psychiatry chair John Krystal, and researchers and executives at the frontier of behavioral health and AI.

Publisher

Jimini Health

Category

health & fitness · science · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

22 May 2025

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

33 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Repetition Doesn’t Make You Learn Faster, Spacing Does

   The number of repetitions has zero influence on overall learning when spaced out over a fixed period. This gap in our scientific understanding has limited how we design everything from educational curricula to AI training protocols. The guest on this episode, Prof. Vijay Mohan K. Namboodiri, leads a research lab at UCSF where he investigates the biological implementation of learning algorithms and dopamine signaling.

2. 

   23 Sept 2026

   Your Brain Hates Unpredictability

   Psychedelics may increase apparent disorder in the brain, but beneath that disorder, Adeel Razi’s research found structured brain trajectories shaped by the quality and context of the experience. Those trajectories were also associated with changes in mindset the following day. Razi leads computational neuroscience research at Monash University, where his work combines brain modeling, machine learning, psychedelics, and biologically inspired AI.

3. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Your Immune System Might Be Causing Your Depression

   Think about the last time you were really sick. You didn't want to eat, you stayed in bed, you lost interest in everything. That's your immune system talking to your brain. For roughly one in four people with depression, that circuit never fully turns off. Dr. Naoise Mac Giollabhui, Director of Research on Inflammatory Depression at Harvard Medical School and Mass General, joins Neural Compass to explain what chronic inflammation is doing to the brain — and why treating it could change psychiatry. Option B — Failed trials/science problem as a hook: For decades, researchers ran large trials giving anti-inflammatory drugs to depressed patients. Most of them failed. The problem wasn't the treatment — it was that only about one in four depressed people actually have the inflammatory subtype those drugs could help. Dr. Naoise Mac Giollabhui joins Mark to explain how psychiatry is finally learning to ask the right question: not just "is this person depressed?" but "why?"

Who has been a guest on Neural Compass

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Jerry Colonna
• Dr Adam Yala
• Yan-David "Yanda" Erlich
• Dr Amber Childs
• Jon Tippens

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

10 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 15 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

16

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

Contact Neural Compass

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Questions about Neural Compass