Anna Tommerdahl

Getting a pet dog is often suggested to people who need extra motivation to exercise a little more. Having a dog will force you to go outside and go on walks that you might otherwise take, and that, in turn, can help improve your physical health.

But what about your mental health? Can pets have a significant effect on our mental well-being? Your first thought with that question may be along the lines of the companionship pets supply, maybe their role as a stress-reducer, particularly in those with mental health

The Brain Gauge: A revolutionary tool for assessing brain health.

Imagine a world where brain health could be measured in a manner as simply as taking your temperature. Check the reading, and you have your answer. Essentially a 1-2 minute task would give you an idea about the status of your brain health. You could immediately determine if that hit your child took to the head playing sports caused a concussion or see if the age of your parents was starting to have an effect on their brain function. Or

Everyone has some experience with stress. It could be acute stress from cramming for a test (or two) in high school, getting the jitters before a big race or game, or experiencing a traumatic event; or it could be a chronic dose of stress from your job, from the lack of having a job, taking care of a sick loved one, or being chronically sick yourself. Stress can come in all shapes and sizes, but do all of these scenarios affect our brains the same way? What exactly is going

A functional measure simply tells you how well something works. In the physical world, there are lots of functional measures. How fast can you run a mile? How much weight can you lift? How fast can you swim across the pool? Can you run up 2 flights of stairs without getting out of breath? These measures tell you something about performance and how well your body functions when it tries to do something - when it is stressed or pushing the envelope.

Why are functional measures important? After all, I

The enteric nervous system (ENS), the nervous system that innervates our gut, is fairly extensive and plays an important role in both our physical and brain health.

If you’ve read many of our other posts, you know that we like to take a systems-level (or "holistic") approach when talking about brain health. In contrast to reductionist science which looks at a small portion of a larger system in isolation from all other parts of the system (which, to be fair, does have its place sometimes), we recognize

The question of “why do we sleep?” has long been asked and has never been well understood. Despite it being a subject of study as early as the 1700’s (although probably earlier), there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding our need to spend up to a third of our lives in an unconscious state. As suggested by Jessen et al. (2015), the 25% reduction in brain energy metabolism isn’t really enough to suggest that sleep is a means of energy conservation. When thinking on an evolutionary scale,