I work with a lot of people who look, on paper, like they’re conquering life. They have strong careers, strong bodies, and every success box checked. However, I don’t find that they feel accomplished. That gap is what sent me down a research rabbit hole on consciousness, and it’s how I found Dr. Aldrich Chan.
Dr. Chan is a neuropsychologist, which means his job is to assess how the brain is actually functioning, not just how someone describes feeling. He came up through the research side first, at the University of Miami’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Aging, comparing brain-scan data against thousands of other scans and performances to build the normative baselines that let a clinician later test someone without a scanner at all. One finding from that work stuck with me: a memory measure called proactive interference, how old information intrudes on new learning, turned out to have very high sensitivity and specificity for catching mild cognitive impairment early, in his read even outperforming a scan for that purpose. Catching decline before it’s obvious, rather than after, is the whole game.
But the reason I wanted him on the show is his theoretical work. He’s built two original frameworks, one describing how humans became disconnected from ourselves and from nature, the other describing the path back. I want to be clear that these are his frameworks, not settled consensus science. He builds them out of real neuroscience, but they are his synthesis. Here are five ideas from our conversation I want you sitting with.
1. “Separation” isn’t esoteric. It’s two brain networks doing exactly what they evolved to do.
Dr. Chan calls his first framework the SAD theory: separation, alienation, and discord. Separation is the idea that we experience ourselves as cut off from the natural world, even though, biologically, we aren’t. The atoms in your body cycle through the same air, water, and soil as everything around you.
Where it gets useful clinically is the mechanism. Two networks do the separating. The default mode network, which Dr. Chan calls the MOTS network (mental time travel, others, and the self), lets you replay the past, simulate the future, reflect on yourself, and model what another person is thinking. It’s also the network active when your mind wanders. And the research he cited, from Killingsworth and Gilbert in 2010, found people’s minds wander unintentionally about 46.9 percent of the time. Nearly half your waking life, spent somewhere other than where you are.
The second network, the central executive network, handles goal-directed strategizing, and it also requires stepping out of the present moment to do it. Neither network is a flaw. An orchestra needs each player to be a separate instrument. The problem starts when separation tips into alienation and discord, and I think that’s the gap a lot of high performers are living in: two networks doing their job well, and a person who never feels quite present because of it.
2. Evolutionary mismatch reframes conditions like ADHD instead of pathologizing them
Dr. Chan’s second phase, alienation, leans on evolutionary mismatch theory: the idea that our nervous systems are still built for a world that ended a long time ago. He put the timeline in a way I haven’t heard before. If human history were compressed into 24 hours, the agricultural revolution happened in the last 7 minutes, the industrial revolution in the last minute, and the digital age in the last 2 seconds. More than 99 percent of our species’ history was spent as hunter-gatherers.
He uses this lens with patients who’ve been handed a diagnosis and told, essentially, that something is wrong with them. His point isn’t that conditions like ADHD aren’t real or that they don’t need support. It’s that traits like poor impulse control or exploratory attention may have been adaptive in an unpredictable ancestral environment, and some research does find these traits associated with more exploratory thinking and creative output. The context changed. The nervous system didn’t. That reframe doesn’t replace treatment, but he’s found it changes how a patient relates to their own diagnosis, from something to be ashamed of to something to be understood.
3. Intuition beats analysis exactly when you’d expect it to, and knowing which one you’re in matters
This is the part of the conversation I keep coming back to. Dr. Chan pointed me to Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, built on a task called the Iowa gambling task, where people make decisions under real uncertainty. The area that lit up when people made a good call they couldn’t consciously explain was the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, part of the default mode network, which functions as a convergence zone pulling in signals from across the brain. That gut feeling that a room, or a person, is “off” even though nothing is visibly wrong: that’s a real, measurable brain process, not superstition.
Where this gets practical is his breakdown of when to trust which system. If a problem is simple or complex but the variables are known, analysis wins. If the variables are genuinely unknown, uncertain, intuition tends to outcompete analysis. Most of real life sits in that second category, which is exactly where people default to overthinking.
He also gave me a genuinely useful fix for a very ordinary version of this: choice overload. Working memory realistically holds about four items at a time, not the seven-plus-or-minus-two most of us learned. That’s why a family can burn 30 minutes trying to pick a movie. His fix, which I’ve already started using, is to pre-select four to six options throughout the day as they come up, so decision time becomes a choice between a short list instead of an infinite one.
4. The mind-body split shows up in the exam room, and the gut-brain connection is part of why
Dr. Chan’s third phase, discord, is about the belief systems we’re handed, and the biggest one he sees clinically is the war between mind and body: virtues get credited to the “soul,” and everything uncomfortable gets blamed on “just biology.” He described clients who treat a compulsion or an urge as separate from their real self, which sets up a conflict that doesn’t resolve.
The evidence he leans on for why this split doesn’t hold up biologically: the enteric nervous system sends more signal traffic up to the brain than the brain sends down to the gut, by his account, and shifts in gut microbiota have been linked to changes in mood and cognition in the research he follows. He also referenced work connecting cardiovascular health to executive function. None of this means gut health is the whole story, and I’d treat any single mechanism as one piece of a much larger picture rather than the explanation. But the direction of the evidence is consistent: mind and body aren’t running two separate systems, and treating them that way in a clinical setting tends to make things worse, not better.
On the “love isn’t just an emotion” thread we got into: Dr. Chan pointed to affective neuroscience research, notably Jaak Panksepp’s work, which treats CARE, along with systems like PLAY and LUST, as primary, hardwired emotional circuits rather than purely learned responses. I’ll flag that this is one influential framework in a field with more than one competing model of emotion, not a settled final answer. Still, it lines up with something I see constantly in my own patients: attachment and connection aren’t optional extras layered on top of biology. They’re closer to a biological drive, alongside hunger and thirst.
5. His best parenting advice has nothing to do with screens
Toward the end, I asked him directly what he’d tell a parent trying to raise a less “misaligned” kid. His answer: get comfortable accepting help. He pointed to alloparenting, the practice, common across hunter-gatherer societies, of a child being raised by a wide circle of trusted adults rather than two parents alone. He cited a statistic on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population anthropologists have studied closely, showing children there spend roughly 40 percent of their time with people other than their biological parents. His read is that this isn’t a deficiency; it’s closer to how humans were actually built to raise children, and it shows up in expanded social skills and, in his clinical experience, more resilience in kids who had even one additional trusted adult in their corner.
His second piece of advice: a child under two isn’t capable of manipulating you. Responding quickly to their needs at that age doesn’t spoil them; it’s what builds secure attachment. And past that age, he’d rather see parents let kids struggle through something and learn from mistakes than hover to prevent every one.
Where this leaves you
None of Dr. Chan’s frameworks are a replacement for actual clinical care if something is genuinely wrong. But I think there’s real value in his central move: taking traits and reactions that get labeled as deficits, and asking what they were actually built to do. A wandering mind, a strong gut reaction, an “impulsive” kid, a felt sense that something’s off in a room: these aren’t malfunctions. They’re old systems running in a new environment.
If you want a place to start this week: build a short list of decisions before you’re stuck making them under pressure, and if you’re a parent, let one more trusted adult into the circle around your kid.
Stay Forever Strong.
Dr. Gabrielle Lyon
This content is for general educational purposes based on a conversation with Dr. Aldrich Chan and reflects his own theoretical frameworks and clinical experience. It is not a substitute for individualized medical, psychological, or psychiatric care. If you have concerns about your own or your child’s attention, memory, or mental health, talk with a qualified clinician.
