Mark Tommerdahl

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,

Exercise can give your brain an immediate boost – we conducted a simple study and report results.
Reaction time (RT) is one of the most common ways to measure brain activity. Simple reaction time - the time elapsed between a stimulus and corresponding response - has been used to assess cognitive function in both healthy and impaired individuals. Reaction time variability (RTvar) - a measure of the standard deviation of reaction time scores - can be used to quantify attention span, and tends to be higher in people with ADHD and