About Josh
I'm a board-certified neurologist, a four-time bestselling author, and the founder of the Institute for Performance Neurology. My work is about how the brain builds extraordinary skill, and how people can use that to learn and perform at their best.
I spent the first part of my career in clinical neurology and research. My research focused on Alzheimer's disease and cognitive aging. Clinically, I've treated people with memory disorders and complex headache conditions.
The deeper I went, the more I found myself drawn to the opposite question. Not why brains fail, but how they produce extraordinary capability in the first place, and why we so badly underestimate what every brain can do.
I also came to see that the two questions were connected. I couldn't stop cognitive decline and dementia with medications. But helping people build more capable brains, by continuing to learn and build new skills throughout their lives, turned out to be the biggest lever we have for preventing them.
I found that the most important questions about human potential don't have a field of their own:
- How do we build ability?
- How do we use it when the pressure is on?
- How do we keep it for a lifetime?
Educators, sports psychologists, and brain-health researchers each study one piece. Almost none of that work starts with how the brain actually works.
I live in Atlanta, where you can find me picking banjos, swinging tennis rackets, or thwarting impostors wherever they lurk.
The Institute for Performance Neurology
I founded the Institute for Performance Neurology to study those three questions together, starting with the brain. We call that work Performance Neurology: the science of how people build, use, and keep their abilities across a lifetime.
Visit the Institute →
Brainjo
Brainjo started as an experiment. I wanted to see whether learning science could help adults learn music by removing the obstacles that make most of them quit.
That experiment grew into the Brainjo Method, which thousands of adult learners around the world have used. Teaching all those learners has shown me the same thing again and again: when an adult struggles to learn, the fix is almost always in how they practice.
Quick facts
- Board-certified neurologist
- Four-time bestselling author: The Genius and the Impostor, Anyone Can Play Music (first published as The Laws of Brainjo), The Migraine Miracle, and Keto for Migraine
- Founder of the Institute for Performance Neurology
- Creator of the Brainjo Method for learning music
- Host of the Performance Neurology Podcast, and co-host of the Better Brain Fitness podcast with Dr. Tommy Wood
- Writer of Brains, Banjos & Beyond, a free newsletter with more than 45,000 readers
- Award-winning banjo player, with wins in banjo and string band contests