The Vitality Lab Podcast

How Elite Athletes Think Under Pressure | Dr. Amy Whitehead

What do elite athletes and coaches actually think during performance? In this episode, I sit down with Amy Whitehead to explore the Think Aloud method, a powerful tool used in sport psychology to capture real-time thought processes during performance. We discuss how self-talk shapes decision-making, how pressure alters cognition, and why reflection and awareness are critical for high-level performance. The conversation also explores how athletes and coaches can train their minds to regulate emotions, improve focus, and perform under pressure. We go into the different levels of Think Aloud, how it is used differently by athletes and coaches, and how internal dialogue connects to identity, behavior and performance. We also touch on how fatigue and stress influence thinking, and how simple strategies like reframing and awareness can shift performance in real time. If you're interested in performance, psychology, or understanding how the mind works under pressure, this episode will give you a practical and insightful perspective.

€5M to Build AI for Skin Neglected Tropical Diseases | David Shaikh

What does it take to win €5 million to build open-source AI for global health? In this episode, I sit down with David Shaikh — founder of Sherwood Sciences — to unpack how he secured major European funding to build an AI-powered app designed to help frontline health workers diagnose neglected tropical skin diseases across Sub-Saharan Africa. We go deep into: • Why the hardest part of AI isn’t the model — it’s the data • Building the largest skin NTD dataset ever collected • Bias in medical AI and why skin tone matters • Why this project is fully open-source • What it really means to build an “impact startup” • Why raising VC isn’t always the right move • Entrepreneurship, rejection, delusion, and betting on yourself This isn’t about AI replacing doctors. It’s about giving healthcare workers leverage — in regions where there is one dermatologist for millions of people. We also explore the philosophical side of building: how to handle failure, how to think about money vs impact, and why your 20s are for exploration — not pressure. If you’re interested in AI, global health, startups, or building something that actually matters — this one’s for you.

Decoding the Brain's Memory System: Insights from the Hippocampus | Dr Marielena Sosa

How does the brain build memory — and why does reward reshape what we remember? In this episode, I sit down with Marielena Sosa to discuss her postdoctoral research at Stanford University, where she studied how the hippocampus encodes space, context, and reward to construct cognitive maps of experience. Dr. Sosa is now a Principal Investigator at University of Colorado Boulder, leading a lab focused on the neural mechanisms of memory and prediction. We explore: – Why memory is not passive storage but active prediction – How reward reorganizes neural representations – The relationship between spatial coding and value – What deteriorates in aging and Alzheimer’s disease – Whether music and dance can engage compensatory circuits in Parkinson’s disease This conversation moves from fundamental systems neuroscience to broader questions about neurodegeneration, plasticity, and how the brain continuously updates its internal model of the world.

Don’t Become Your Outcome: The Voice in Your Head Shapes Your Reality | Dr. Alexandra S. Ilieva,

In complex fields like biotech and health, technical brilliance isn’t enough. Judgment, psychological flexibility, and the ability to operate under uncertainty often determine who adapts — and who collapses. In this episode, Dr. Alexandra Ilieva, philosopher and Teaching Associate in Buddhist Studies at the University of Cambridge, joins The Vitality Lab to explore how ideas from Madhyamaka Buddhism and contemporary pragmatism can function as practical tools for thinking clearly under pressure. We examine: * Why attaching identity to outcomes distorts judgment * How the “voice in your head” shapes perception and decision-making * Why over-identifying with views makes disagreement feel existential * The difference between discovering yourself and constructing yourself * How loosening attachment to labels can restore agency This conversation isn’t therapy. It’s about internal architecture. If innovation requires navigating ambiguity, failure, and disagreement, then how we relate to identity, language, and ego becomes part of the translational process itself. Because before ideas move from lab to world, they move through a mind.

Microbiome in Parkinson’s: Biomarker, Bystander, or Therapeutic Target? | Dr. Frederick Clasen

In this episode, we go beyond genetic and molecular narratives of Parkinson’s disease to explore a bold new frontier: the role of the microbiome as a biomarker, bystander, or therapeutic target in cognitive decline. My guest today is Dr Frederick Clasen, Research Associate at the Centre for Host-Microbiome Interactions, Faculty of Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences, King’s College London. Dr Clasen completed his undergraduate and master’s work in Bioinformatics and Biotechnology at the University of Pretoria before earning his PhD across the Francis Crick Institute and King’s College London, where he developed mathematical and genome-scale models of host and microbial metabolism. Dr Clasen is first author on a landmark 2025 study published in Gut Microbes that used shotgun metagenomics and machine learning to map both oral and gut microbiome changes across healthy controls and Parkinson’s patients with varying degrees of cognitive impairment. Their work reveals that microbes — and specifically oral microbes translocating to the gut with enriched virulence factors — may be linked to Parkinson’s cognitive decline via an oral-gut-brain axis, offering not just associations but mechanistic hypotheses and potential biomarkers. In this conversation we unpack: * Why the microbiome may be more than a bystander in Parkinson’s disease * What makes a microbial biomarker credible vs. noise * How virulence factors and host metabolism may influence brain function * What it takes to move from correlation to testable mechanism * The real hurdles — and opportunities — for translating microbiome science into diagnostics and therapies If you’re a scientist, clinician, founder, or investor curious about where biology meets translation, this episode will sharpen how you think about mechanism, de-risking, and what truly counts as a target in complex human disease.