A car can be a very useful tool to get you from Point A to Point B, but if you don’t know how to drive a car, it doesn’t do you much good. Even the most powerful tool isn’t very useful if you don’t know how to use it. Since there’s not a comparable technology to the Brain Gauge on the market today, we understand when people aren’t sure of the best methods for using a Brain Gauge to track their brain health. That’
There are a lot of factors to consider when evaluating population brain health, and there is a relationship between speed of concussion recovery and baseline brain health at the population level.
As noted in several previous posts, exercise and keeping an active lifestyle are an important part of maintaining good brain health. And yet, many sports put you at risk for developing a concussion. We hear about football on the news all the time, but athletes in other sports - like soccer, basketball, volleyball, cycling, and even swimming (apparently quite
And perhaps more importantly, am I taking the right amount of supplements?
I am fascinated by the number of supplements on the market that claim all kinds of brain health benefits - things like better memory, optimized brain performance, and even reversal of the aging process. While I am not disputing or supporting any of these claims, what really impresses me is how many people take supplements on the blind faith that they will improve or optimize their brain performance. How do we know that supplements are actually helping us?
We’re getting stronger, taller and faster, but are we getting smarter?
Running a four minute mile was supposed to be impossible. Until 1954, most coaches, runners, scientists, and the even world’s top physiologists all declared that humans were physically incapable of a sub 4:00 performance, even given ideal training and race conditions. It was simply too fast.
In 1954 a young medical student named Roger Bannister proved them all wrong. On a windy day in Oxford, England, Bannister ran 1 mile in three minutes and 59.4
Many of the neurological conditions that we study here at Cortical Metrics are a result of a common underlying problem—neuroinflammation. Whether you’re dealing with an acute concussion or a full-blown case of Alzheimer’s Disease, you have neuroinflammation. Specifically with Alzheimer’s Disease, the inflammation is what ultimately leads to the development of the characteristic plaques in the brain, and while drug companies spend years and millions of dollars developing drugs that target the plaques, those drugs are entirely ineffective at decreasing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease
Most currently available concussion tests rely on baseline scores. At the beginning of the season, athletes complete an assessment to establish their baseline cognitive health. When an athlete sustains a head injury or shows symptoms of a concussion, a trainer or coach administers the test again and compares the two sets of scores. If the post-injury scores are substantially lower than the baseline results, athletes are removed from play.
At first glance, this approach seems reasonable. Everyone's brain is different, so by comparing a potentially concussed individual to that individual's
I’ve been in the research field for close to 40 years now (easily 40 if you count my years as an undergraduate biology major, when I was probably more interested in non-academic pursuits, but that is another story), and throughout that tenure, a question that has bothered people – as well as researchers – is why do people age at different rates? Why do some people age gracefully into their late 90s and others struggle through their 60s? As we began to do translational research (i.e., that brand of research
People like to go fast. We like fast cars and fast lanes. We want to “Earn money fast!” and “Lose weight fast!” It’s why we blow our paychecks on the latest phones and the hottest laptops. As every third grader in a playground footrace will tell you, it’s fun to be the fastest.
That’s why we’re never surprised when Brain Gauge users seem most interested in their Speed metric. When we test college students, the football players always want to record their scores so they can
Neurophysiological deficits detected over one year post-concussion
Even though the water swirls the opposite direction down under, it looks like concussed brains in Australia look like concussed brains in North America; regardless of how long it has been since someone’s last concussion, it’s hard to hide neurophysiological changes that persist from the Brain Gauge methods. Dr. Alan Pearce of the University of Melbourne recently presented some very interesting data at an international meeting in Toronto. In his study, he made observations on individuals from three different groups: post-concussion
Use of the Brain Gauge with the knowledge of a tuning curve will help you optimize brain performance.
Whether it's at work or on the field, humans are constantly looking for ways to get better. But our bodies, just like any machine, needed to be tuned in very specific ways in order to for us to achieve optimal performance. For example, if you want to run a fast marathon, you'll need to put in a lot of long runs and a lot of calories in the months leading up to
