Can Your Fingertips Reveal What Is Happening Inside Your Brain?

Why the sense of touch opens a deeper window into the brain than sight or sound, and how two vibrating fingertips reach the parietal lobe.
What brain fog actually looks like when it is measured: two points that feel fuzzy instead of distinct, and the role of lateral inhibition.
How a reaction-time reading done right differs from the phone and app versions that can be off by hundreds of milliseconds.

About the Expert

Alya Ahmad, MD, FAAP

Too Curious MDs

We are two and too curious physicians applying the lens of Narrative Medicine, exploring Integrative practices and psychedelic treatment in healthcare. Together with our guests we weave new learnings from stories, expertise, and the sciences. With the wisdom from holistic, alternative, and conventional medicine, we’are here to challenge the status quo!!!!We are curious about the connectivity and complexity between diverse fields of knowledge as they relate to consciousness, chronic illness, mental health, resilience, and beyond! Stories of illness in the context of caring for patients in psychedelic medicine, what emerges and what we can learn as health care changes.

Guest

Mark Tommerdahl

Dr. Mark Tommerdahl is a biomedical engineer, neuroscientist, and longtime professor at the University of North Carolina, where he has spent his career studying how populations of neurons interact across the cortex. He earned his B.S. in biology at Davidson College and his M.S. and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and mathematics at the University of North Carolina, with early research supported by the NIH. He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications on cortical dynamics, sensory processing, plasticity, and pain. That research led to Brain Gauge, the quantitative sensory testing tool built by his company, Cortical Metrics, to assess aspects of brain function. His students know him as Dr. T.