Richard Bergland Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

Not all ideas of the ideas that pass from one brain to another brain... are good ideas; some are mistakes. These I call 'mismemes'.

Richard Bergland
Few would have predicted that the discovery of the circulation of the blood would have changed the way philosophers view the world, theologians conceive of God, or astronomers look at the stars, yet all of that happened.

Richard Bergland
The existing paradigm about the brain has ceased to function adequately.

Richard Bergland
The science of neuroendocrinology — the brain-to-pituitary link that was discerned by [Joe] Hinsey, [George] Wislocki, du Vigneaud, and [Geoffrey] Harris—is dependent upon hormones flowing within nerve axons. This phenomenon, axonal flow, was first noted by Ernst and Barta Scharrer... For many decades it was assumed that axonal flow was always 'down'... away from the brain.

Richard Bergland
If the question, 'Why is the heart hollow?', had a profound impact on all intellectual disciplines, would you expect any less of the question, 'Why is the brain hollow?'

Richard Bergland
If the powerful hormone vasopressin, or ADH, is injected into the blood, the body will retain water. If ADH is injected into the ventricle the opposite happens: the body loses water.

Richard Bergland
Molecules move not only from the brain to the endocrine system but also from the endocrine system, indeed, from all parts of the body to the brain.

Richard Bergland
The brain is a gland of unity: the brain is one with the body.

Richard Bergland
Those at the top in brain science gained their pedestals by knowing more and more about less and less.

Richard Bergland
The neatly integrated paradigm for brain water... was derived from experiments done by Walter Dandy... Most brain scientists and brain physicians honour the Dandy paradigm as a navigator honours the North Star.... yet new scientific evidence makes it difficult, if not impossible, to accept... It is a mismeme; the experimental facts no longer allow it to be 'true', and we need a paradigm switch.

Richard Bergland
The ventricles of the human brain... are filled with hormones, and until the hormones swimming in these oceans are dredged out, countless millions of our fellows will remain with brain illnesses that can be neither understood nor treated. Many of their hormone-hungry brains may be fixed as easily as hormone-hungry bodies are fixed with thyroid hormone, insulin, oestrogen and testosterone, but that work cannot begin until cause and effect relationships between brain hormones and brain diseases have been established.

Richard Bergland
Despite the effectiveness of electroconvulsive therapy... it may cause long-lasting problems with short-term memory.... Yet despite the protests, the ability of cortisol studies to identify patients who will benefit from ECT guarantees that more patients will receive it.

Richard Bergland
Neurosurgery can be learned... neurosurgery cannot be taught.

Richard Bergland
As hormonal amplification is the hallmark of all of the brain-to-gland relationships of neuroendocrinology, hormonal deamplification is the hallmark of all gland-to-brain relationships of endocrine neurology. This is the fundamental difference between the two sciences.

Richard Bergland
During electroconvulsive therapy the blood-brain barrier is opened and during the time that it remains open there are heroically high levels of circulating pituitary hormones. Thus there is every reason to believe that... it delivers hormones to the brain...

Richard Bergland
Brain/body relationships might depend upon a chorus of individual hormones... which are released together to sing hormonal harmonies to the body.

Richard Bergland
The greatest array of brain hormones is found in the ventricle, not in the spinal fluid.

Richard Bergland
By placing... cell-containing soup in bullet-shaped cell cages formed out of permeable plastics, a single population of cells can be introduced into the brain.... the hormones that are produced by the cells make their way... into the brain....'artificial glands'... with no fear of cell migration.

Richard Bergland
Twenty years from now, the disease, 'presenile dimentia' will be understood as well as diabetes is today.

Richard Bergland
Physicians and scientists will measure brain hormones—in ventricular fluid and elsewhere—will link these to specific diseases, and will devise space-age techniques to restock the mind's hormonal pantries. The only question is, 'When?'

Richard Bergland
The brain remains silently separated from the noisy endocrine consequences.

Richard Bergland
The measurement of hormones in the bloodstream of patients will not reflect the endocrine activity of the brain.

Richard Bergland
If a 'memory peptide' could be found to be deficient in patients with dimentia, these patients could be treated in the same way that patients with diabetes are treated with insulin.

Richard Bergland
Miracles of inner healing are everyday occurrences.

Richard Bergland
Animal experiments have confirmed the necessity of delivering hormones into the ventricle: the powerful hormone endorphin does not change behavior if it is given intravenously; vasopressin will improve memory in animals only if it given into the ventricles; insulin given through the bloodstream does not control apetite but it is the best hormone for such control if given into the brain; and bombesin... only stops stomach ulceration if given into the brain.

Richard Bergland
The double-think of modern science—'Molecules shape the body, but electricity shapes the mind'—ends abruptly with the realization that regulatory hormones control both brain and body functions.

Richard Bergland
Despite the evidence that ventricular hormones do not make their way out of the ventricle, the presence of large ventricles in many schizophrenic patients, and the ability of two-dimensional gels to provide a profile of peptides in the ventricle, not a single catheter has been placed into the ventricle of a schizophrenic patient to measure the peptides in the ventricle.... There is no animal model for this disease, the answer can only come from human studies.

Richard Bergland
It would be easier... if all animals spoke the same endocrine language, for then correlations made in the laboratory could be quickly moved to the bedside. Unfortunately, such is not the case. The hormone prolactin, for example, has at least seventy-eight different functions in seventy-eight different species

Richard Bergland
Dandy's experiments were done in the fast lane of science... performed with no control animals, with no record of the number of animals operated on, with no regard for inter-species variability, with no record of the time base, with no histological correlation, with no attempt to quantify the differences and with no involvement with a neutral scientist.

Richard Bergland
Scientists have mastered the techniques of hormone analysis, measurement and manufacture. What is lacking is the correlation between a specific brain disease and a specific brain hormone.... these correlations can only come from a medical team of co-operating physicians.

Richard Bergland