Okay, I got my brain gauge and used it for the first time and it was fabulous.
It matched exactly what I already know to be true. My sense of time passing tested off, which it is.
My reaction time tested slow and it is. I had a low score under fatigue, which a person who spent a decade with insomnia may well have. Everything made sense.
I don’t understand what TOJ means.
I am curious how people are using it for improving brain health. Do they use it every day? Do they use the ICES while using it? Do they test multiple times per day to see if there are better and worse scores at different times of day?
Howdy! By way of introduction, I am probably the person to blame for the invention of the Brain Gauge…happy to hear that you liked it!
TOJ stands for “Temporal Order Judgement” and it measures the ability for you to perceive which of two stimuli comes first. It is probably one of the most sensitive measures, which means that there are a lot of things that can impact it. You can read about it in detail here:
The short answer to the question about TOJ is that it is tied to circuitry in the frontal and pre-frontal cortex, and this area is sensitive to a wide range of influences. For example, we have recently observed (in an ongoing study) that TOJ is very sensitive to stress/anxiety. In one particular situation (pre and post stress reducing therapy), this measure changed dramatically - about 80% (more details on this study after we get a bit more data!).
how often that you test is a question that we get quite often. and the answer is like the answer to many questions on this forum - it depends on what you are looking at.
The longer answer to the frequency of testing question is here:
The short answer is that for general purposes of monitoring brain health, it is a bit like weighing yourself when you are trying to lose weight. There will be fluctuations throughout the day, but it is the overall trend is really what you are trying to track.
I have tried it at different times of day and my brain changes demonstrably at different times of day. Time is always off. Focus is always on, even at 2 in the morning.
I dropped from a 98% TOJ at 2 in the morning to a 5% TOJ score at 7 in the morning.
So far, I am just trying to see trends, but that type of swing fascinated me.
My feedback on the brain gauge is that I already find it extremely useful.
I just would like to be able to try to train the part of the brain which is broken.
I feel like I can’t tell the difference between some of the things and yet I guess right when I can see the feedback, but don’t know how to figure out the right answer without the feedback and don’t know how to learn. I would like the opportunity to put on the ICES and do the weaker sections over and over again and see if I can increase plasticity and teach my brain to learn in that area. Not sure if that matters or if I should just use the ICES and choose prefrontal cortex tasks and try them while wearing it. Anyway, I see my 5% score and want to train that area and feel like if there was a setting with more obvious differences or something to try to increase plasticity that might help.
Performance anxiety can have a huge impact on some of the scores, and I suspect that this could account for some of the swings in your scoring. A couple of things for you to do - first, make note of your raw scores. The raw scores are translated into the per cent scores that you have been referencing. TOJ is actually a measure of the number of msecs that it takes to determine which of the two stimuli came first. A raw score of 30 msecs will give you a very good per cent score, but 45 or 50 msecs will put you in the 50-60% range. In other words, looking at the raw score gives you a much more sensitive gauge of your performance. Extremely poor scoring on this is in the 150 msec range (which some conditions actually lead to). Second thing to try on this is a different strategy for taking the test: try to relax, don’t worry about how quickly you respond and focus on which of the 2 stimuli came last in order to determine which came first. The third thing to note is that if you are doing something, such as PEMF to improve your score, this may take 2-3 days. I suspect (and note that this is only an opinion since I am not making any medical claims) that if you started using ICES 2-3 days ago that you will probably start to see an improvement in that score.