Mark Tommerdahl

Frequency of testing brain function can be analogous to weighing yourself.

The question of how frequently someone should test themselves (or be tested by a clinician) with the Brain Gauge comes up quite often. The short answer: it depends on the reason that you are testing. Many people are doing things to make their brain function better. This is a bit like doing things to lose weight. If you are on a diet and trying to lose weight by increasing physical activity as well as cutting back on the calories,

When considering the health effects of “conventional” vs. “organic” food, the debate is usually centered around the consumer: Are there more nutrients in one or the other? Are pesticide/herbicide levels on conventional food significant enough to cause problems? Sometimes the discussion will veer towards which is more costly to the environment, or which is more efficient for feeding a growing world population. However the discussion rarely ventures to the subject of the health of the farmer growing the food, and thus applying the fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. But a

Can the Brain Gauge be used to decrease pain or improve brain function?

For many years, people have found modest success with treating different forms of chronic pain with different types of tactile stimulation (vibration, electrical stimuli, etc.). Results from those studies (and there were quite a few) are both divergent in terms of results obtained from tactile stimulation and inconclusive. In our own work, we demonstrated a reduced effect of high frequency tactile stimulation (this means we delivered 150 Hz vibration to the skin at the same time as

Probing brain function by vibrating the fingertips
One of our favorite quotes of the year is from someone who was considering purchase of a Brain Gauge for his practice. But then he consulted a lawyer, and the lawyer told him “you can’t prove that the Brain Gauge does anything other than test finger function.”

In the court of law, this is probably true. People have had enormous difficulty proving that anything means anything in that arena (including EEGs, MRIs, MEGs, etc.) and the Brain Gauge would be no exception.

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) has been featured prominently in the news for the past few years. Public awareness of brain injuries has led to a growing number of people asking us about treatments for TBI, and in particular, mTBI. For those of you unfamiliar with the nomenclature, mTBI stands for “mild” TBI and this is often used synonymously with concussion. Moderate and severe TBI are much worse conditions of brain trauma, and the dividing line between mild and moderate is (usually) how long someone was in a coma post-traumatic injury

Reaction time is one of the most frequently collected and depended upon metrics for cognitive assessment – but most methods are extremely inaccurate. The Brain Gauge is the world’s most accurate commercially available device that can deliver the reaction time test.

It seems like there is a constant and steady improvement in technology and computing power. The cell phones that we carry now have exponentially more computational power than computers that we (I speak for the people in my generation) were programming in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However,