Post Published on July 10, 2013.
Last Updated on April 29, 2016 by davemackey.
I came home from working at the church and noticed a small package on the front steps. I couldn’t remember anything of this size I had ordered, so I walked inside and slide it open – to my surprise, there was the Fisher Wallace Stimulator! I’d purchased it on Tuesday (7/9) and received it the next day (7/10). I don’t expect everyone will get it that fast – but I’m glad it miraculously came so quickly to me. Here is a photo of what you see when you open the box:
I took out the pouch and unloaded its contents, which look like this:
I must say that the first thing that impressed me was the presence of two Duracell batteries. I know, I know, its a very small thing – but doesn’t it just drive you nuts when you get an electronic device and it doesn’t have the batteries!?!? Well, it drives me nuts. Lets take a closer look at the different components:
This is the stimulator. Looks pretty simple. The bottom light indicates the device is on, the lights with numbers indicate how high of intensity it is running at – they recommend starting at two. Despite my great desire to start at four, I started with two.
Flip the device over and pop off the battery cover and this is what you’ll see. Nothing too fancy, but note the nice belt clip. This is where I first had problems. There are two little hooks at the bottom of the battery cover that need to slip in a certain way and it took me a few tries (nothing major) to get them in. Then I picked it up and the battery cover fell off! What?! I realized that at the top there is a little latch which can be pressed up or down (most simply snap in, which probably makes them more likely to break – so I think this is a better design). Once I had actually latched the battery cover shut, everything was good.
Now these wires plug into the stimulator and then into sponge covers which attach to my head. Looks a little frighteningly like I’m getting ready to jump start a car battery, no?
This is the front of the sponge containers. Fisher Wallace kindly inserts the first set of sponges for you.
And here are the sponges after I’ve soaked them in the sink. Not sure if you can tell from the photo but they have expanded significantly.
It only took a few minutes, but now she is ready to go…So, I latch her onto my belt and start her up.
I had no problem attaching it to my belt and you can see the green light says that it is on and the two yellow lights say that it is at level 2. Note that they are actually flashing, but that doesn’t show up in a still photo. 🙂
And here I am wearing the stimulator…but that isn’t really what I look like when I’m using it, b/c I use reading glasses…it’s more like this:
Yes, that is a little more dorky/geeky looking, like it should be.
I also took a close up shot so you can see how the sponge/sponge cover fits under the headband immediately above my sideburns.
Now I did have one other small problem. At first the device was powering on and showing one level 1 activity, but no matter how high I turned it up, it didn’t go up any levels. If I pressed the sponges against my head, the activity went up. I was confused.
As my fingers ran across the two sponge covers at the same time I realized that they didn’t feel the same. I turned the device off, took out the sponge covers and realized that I had placed one backwards (the sponge was pointing out, with the wire against my head, instead of the sponge being pressed against my head). I corrected this user fail and restarted the device – this time everything worked just dandy.
The device has now finished its first cycle and I don’t feel any noticeable difference, nor did I really feel anything during the entire process. If it wasn’t for the lights on the device, I would have questioned if anything was happening.
So, there ya are. You’ve experienced my first trial with this device. I intend on using it twice a day (once in the morning, once before bed) for the next several weeks and report my findings on a daily basis…but don’t worry, I won’t clog Dave Enjoys up with that, instead I’ll post about it over at OCD Dave. So if you want to read about the ongoing saga you can subscribe to Dave Enjoys using the email subscription box on the right of the OCD Dave blog page or you can use RSS (if you are a geek :)) or you can like the OCD Dave Facebook page and notices of new blog posts will go up there.