Can HRV be used to monitor brain functions like the Brain Gauge?



Many heart medications that improve HRV have a negative impact on brain health that can be measured with the Brain Gauge.

Several people have asked us how heart rate variability (HRV) compares to the Brain Gauge. The question we keep getting is: "Is the HRV measure from my smartwatch as good of an indicator of brain health as the Brain Gauge measures?"

The short answer to this question is no, HRV and Brain Gauge measure completely different things. Heart rate variability gives a measure of the autonomic nervous


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The Accuracy Measure



Lateral inhibition: using amplitude discrimination to probe the balance between excitation and inhibition
Lateral inhibition is the brain's way of improving contrast between adjacent or near-adjacent cortical areas. In the 1960s, Nobel prize winner Georg Von Bekesy postulated the idea of lateral inhibition. The basic idea was that when you deliver a stimulus, brain activity will be correlated with the stimulus site, and the surrounding areas will be inhibited or turned off. Long story short, Von Bekesy’s predictions, which were based on sensory testing, turned out to be true.


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How often should you test your brain function?



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,


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Cause or Effect? Alcohol Consumption and Farming Practices



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


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Treating chronic pain with tactile discrimination?



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


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How does the Brain Gauge test brain function?



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.


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Using PEMF to treat traumatic brain injury



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


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TBI, TBI severity and dementia: what is the relationship?



There has been enormous speculation recently about how repetitive concussions could lead to dementia and/or early Alzheimer’s (or Alzheimer like symptoms). Loss of brain function with repetitive blows to the head does not seem like it would be debatable, but many hesitate to take a stand on it because of “lack of evidence”. After all, it could just be coincidence that people get dementia in their late 40s or early 50s after a long career in a sport or activity that repetitively causes glial damage without having time


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The TOJ Measure



Discussing the Temporal Order Judgement task
One of the cortical metrics that you get is called “TOJ” which stands for Temporal Order Judgement. This test delivers two taps, one to each of the two fingers positioned on the Brain Gauge, and queries “which came first?”. The test starts out easy (taps are initially 150 msec apart) and gets harder each time you get the question right (sort of like reading an eye chart – it gets more difficult the farther you progress). If you look at your TOJ raw score (on


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The Connectivity Measure



In a previous report, we discussed how an illusory conditioning stimulus could be context dependent and that frequently delivering repetitive stimuli has the effect of suppressing the percept of a stimulus. Repeat a stimulus many times (the conditioning stimuli that are delivered by the Brain Gauge are typically sinusoidal at a frequency that delivers many repeats to the same place on the finger tip) and the effect is that stimuli feel much smaller. Are there other illusions? The obvious answer is yes, since we’re writing this report. The illusion


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