Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mark Tommerdahl. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Mark with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
Undoubtedly, I got much of my work ethic from my father. He grew up on a farm in Iowa during the Great Depression, joined the army when he was 17 and worked several jobs to work himself through school after WWII. His attitude was to never rest on past success but rather that you are only as good as role in your latest project – no matter how big or small that project was. He always reminded me that on the farm, if you don’t do something, it simply does not get done.
Additionally, he encouraged me in my pursuit of competitive swimming – a sport that definitely rewards an above average work ethic. Short on natural talent but with lots of desire to win pushed me to work hard at the sport.
And finally, my professional mentor, an internationally renowned neuroscientist, was not just exceptionally bright, but had insights that made you more curious and effectively work harder in the pursuit of knowledge. He used to get excited when an eperiment failed because that failure meant that you were getting close to learning something important.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I started my career in Neuroscience in the early 1980s as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, worked there for 45 years, and recently retired as a Professor. My main pursuit was, and always has been, developing a better understanding of how the brain works and the communication that occurs between different parts of the brain. I led a team of scientists and engineers to design and develop methods to assess the brain functions that we observed in animal models and translated those findings into methods that worked quite well on individuals in clinical and clinical research settings. The Office of Naval Research was impressed with our findings and sponsored the productization of the methods, which resulted in the Brain Gauge spinning out from University research and being used in many applications in clinics and research institutes around the world. Application areas include neurodevelopmental (e.g., autism, ADHD), degenerative (e.g., Parkinson’s, aging), traumatic (e.g., concussion, TBI), pain (e.g., migraine, fibromyalgia), pharmaceutical and behavioral (stress, anxiety).
The Brain Gauge is unique in that it obtains a comprehensive score by assessing multiple brain health componen ts that target different mechanisms of information processing in the CNS. The mission of our company is to make quantitative brain health assessment as routine as checking vital signs, enabling individuals and professionals to track cognitive changes influenced by factors from subtle – such as changes brought about by supplements or lifestyle changes – to significant – such as those brought on by debilitating TBI or neurodegenerative disorders. In addition to its capacity as an assessment tool, a growing number of health care professionals are utilizing the Brain Gauge Gym as a foundation for brain fitness.
What we find exciting about the Brain Gauge is that it literally puts brain health into people’s hands. It gives individuals a way to not only track how well their brain is working, but it gives them exercises that helps them maintain a level of brain fitness. Brain training with the Brain Gauge is giving many people the ability to optimize their brain fitness and to learn more about what impacts their brain health.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The first 25 years of my professional career as a neuroscientist was solely in pursuit of knowledge in a lab environment. After that, an iterative process of translating what we learned about dynamic interactions into something that could be easily used by people seemed, at first, to be straight-forward. Once we had achieved our goal of obtaining accurate and objective measures of brain health (or dysfunction), I naively thought that people would rapidly adopt cutting edge state-of-the-art methods for tracking brain health and treatment efficacy. It turns out that only a certain breed of health care providers are interested in better understanding what works for their patients and want to partner with their patients .
There were multiple times in my career where we disrupted dogmatic ideas, and it was very difficult to make advances – though we did – because of that. My advice is simply to never underestimate the power of dogma and how much some individuals are married to those ideas.
“Science progresses one funeral at a time.” – Max Planck. Very insightful!
Tell us what your ideal client would be like?
Currently we work with a lot of researchers and clinicians in the field of brain health. The ideal clinician to work with is someone that is committed to partnering with their patient to improve their brain health and is truly curious about treatment efficacy. Individuals wanting to use evidence based methods and the scientific method to pursue improvements in brain health are ideal “clients”.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.corticalmetrics.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marktommerdahl/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZzmxVY2ewNmuFsVJ-IAIQA
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