The only blows my brain has taken.
I'm a normal guy who's had the kind of head knocks most guys have had — a few big ones, a stack of small ones. I put this page here for one reason: I sometimes wonder whether any of it comes back on me later — now, or down the road. So I looked. Here's what the two machines saw, where they agreed, where they didn't, and how I sit with it.
The bell-rung history.
Three that I remember clearly, and the ordinary stuff on top of them. This is just fact now, not a story.
The horse & the tree branch
A low branch caught me on the top of the head while the horse was moving fast. I lost consciousness on the horse, then fell off and hit the ground hard too.
The hit from the side
Got hit from the side, not the front — that thump on the ground.
The airbag
A car accident. The airbag went off and caught me in the face pretty good. That certainly rung my bell.
The minor ones
Growing up on a farm, playing sports, farmwork — regular life. Moments where you might have rung your bell, but nothing anyone would have called a concussion.
"I remember distinctly a couple of concussions. One — I was young, on a horse… the horse was moving so quickly it was actually a lower branch of a tree that hit me on the top of my head, and I lost consciousness on the horse. So then I fell off… and hit the ground pretty hard too."
"Another time playing football, I got hit — not from the front but from the side… Then there was another one… an air bag went off in a car accident, and it hit me in the face pretty good, and that certainly rung my bell. That was probably 2012, 2013."
"So those were three big ones. There have been minor ones from just living life… but nothing that anyone would have said, 'Oh, you had a concussion.'"
— Kevin MeuretDid it aggregate into something — and did it leave a mark?
"I was really curious — put those three big ones, put a stack of minor ones, and how do those things then aggregate into some type of a concussion issue? And then, did that leave any residual? Did that impact the brain? Did that leave a scar? Did that lead to trauma?… when this bell got rung, was there some type of a trauma to the brain that we may have carried along the way? That's what I was curious about."
— Kevin Meuret · voice interview, Jul 28 2026I'm not chasing a diagnosis. I just wanted to know whether the instruments could see anything that lines up with a history of getting my bell rung — and whether the two of them saw the same thing.
One measures blood flow. The other measures brainwaves.
The Amen SPECT maps where blood — and activity — runs hot or cold. The Peak Brain QEEG maps the electrical rhythms. They don't measure the same thing, which is exactly why it's interesting when they point at the same place.
What each instrument flagged.
The SPECT read
The report's own conclusions, quoted. Two of them name trauma directly:
- Right temporal lobe, increased (both studies) — the report ties this to "memory problems, abnormal perceptions… periods of déjà vu, unexplained headaches."
- Orbital prefrontal cortex, decreased (both studies) — "this pattern has also been seen in response to head injuries affecting this part of the brain."
- "Diamond-Plus" limbic pattern — the report says it "may indicate past emotional trauma."
The QEEG read
The map itself doesn't diagnose a concussion. But two things line up with the question:
- Right-temporal / behind-the-ear tissue — Hill spent real time here (the auditory tissue "waking up"). Same neighborhood the SPECT flagged.
- Frontal shift — the frontal "M" pattern, the same front-of-brain region the SPECT saw running low.
"You look at their brain, and it's all the fog from the apnea, or from the concussion, or from the COVID… ADHD, stress, and fatigue can look very similar."
— Dr. Andrew Hill · practitioner opinion · 32:27Two lenses on the same head.
They agreed on the place
- Right temporal region — SPECT saw it running hot (memory / déjà vu); QEEG spent its time on the same right-temporal tissue.
- Frontal / orbital cortex — SPECT saw it running low (a pattern "seen in response to head injuries"); QEEG saw the frontal shift.
They diverged on the story
- SPECT's lens: an over-active emotional / limbic brain — worry, mood, "past emotional trauma."
- QEEG's lens: an under-powered cortex — tired beta, shallow sleep, fatigue.
- Not a contradiction — different instruments, different layer. But if you're hunting for a clean "concussion did this," neither one gives it to you.
On paper, it mostly doesn't.
Here's the counterweight. The same Amen evaluation ran the standard mental-health screeners — and they came back clean. Whatever the scans lit up, it isn't showing up as a disorder in day-to-day life.
The research is about populations, not about me.
A few papers I found relevant, quoted only for what they actually say. Each is a link if you want to read it. None of them is a verdict on my brain.
- fits the setup Most concussions go unreported — estimates range 12–80% across studies. My "minor ones nobody called a concussion" are exactly that gap. Craig et al., 2020
- context Even after a single mild head injury, about 53% still report symptoms at 12 months — recovery isn't always clean. TRACK-TBI · Nelson et al., 2019
- context Head injury is linked to later mood changes at the population level — the concussion → mood thread. Fann et al., Lancet Psychiatry 2018
- context Imaging can show connectivity changes after concussion that standard scans miss. Hellewell et al., 2020
The instruments give reads. They don't give verdicts.
After all of it, here's the honest answer: I don't know, I can't know for certain, and I'm okay not knowing for certain. Two machines both lingered on the same two regions — that's real, and I'll keep an eye on memory and the déjà-vu thread. But nothing here diagnoses a concussion, and I'm not going to manufacture one out of a color on a scan.
The question that made me build this page — does it come back on me later? — doesn't have an answer yet. What I've got is a baseline: this is where my brain sits today, from two directions. If something shifts down the road, I'll have something real to compare it to. That's the point.
Next: the brainwave maps from Peak Brain.
Next: QEEG · Peak Brain