Anna Tommerdahl

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,

How’s your new year’s resolution going? If you’re one of the stereotypical Americans who made a resolution to get in shape and lose weight this year, then you might also be the stereotypical American who loses motivation for that goal a few weeks into the new year. A new study published in Neurology may help you to regain that motivation.

It’s not uncommon for us to hear in the news about the negative effects that obesity can have on the peripheral parts of our body—things

A diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is pretty daunting. Current conventional medicine will tell you that there is no cure. The media is constantly reminding us that the disease is not just devastating to the person with the diagnosis, but to the caretakers as well. Especially in the beginning stages, it can be extremely frustrating for the inflicted person to know that they are losing their cognitive abilities and the capability to care for themselves. It’s no surprise that as people age, minor lapses in memory such as

Whether you skipped the turkey and opted for a soy-based protein during yesterday's holiday meal, or if you sat silently judging your millenial niece as she refused a serving of the feature dish, you might be wondering: "what's all the fuss about soy?"

Even if you aren't able to keep up with the latest health food trends, you’ve probably heard about soy and its reported health benefits and concern about its potential dangers. Depending on who you ask, you can hear vastly different opinions about the effects