Richard Bergland Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

In decades to come ventricular catheterization performed to measure hormone concentrations will become as routine as the measurement of lumbar 'pressure' is today.

Richard Bergland
Already in animals, some gland-like cells have been transplanted from the adrenal gland into the brain, where they not only survive but continue their secretions.

Richard Bergland
The hormonal genies that have lived unnoticed in the brain since humankind began have escaped; there is no way that they can be put back.

Richard Bergland
Whatever the cerebellum is doing, it's doing a lot of it.

Richard Bergland
As it is possible that the memory loss of senile dementia may stem from a deficiency of 'memory peptide', obesity may result from a deficiency of either bombesin, somatostatin, cholecystokinen, gastrin, or insulin.

Richard Bergland
Amending your own mind is very, very satisfying… amending other people's minds is a fruitless, unsatisfying effort.

Richard Bergland
Patients with uncontrolled epilepsy have an evaluation that usually begins with electrical studies of the surface of the brain.... A hole is drilled in the skull, and electrical measurements made from within the depths of the brain. A large flap of the skull is then lifted up, electrodes placed on the surface of the brain, and the flap sewn back into place so that more electrical studies can be done. The risks... are far greater than those associated with the ventricular taps needed for hormone studies.... If the team of doctors.. can help... areas of the brain that are sending 'bad' signals would be identified and removed... large portions of the brain might be taken away.

Richard Bergland
Neurosurgeons perform ventricular taps with great frequency.... While this is not something to be done lightly, the risks are no greater than those for cardiac catheterization.

Richard Bergland
Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, is the best therapy for unipolar depression that exists.... they have found that the smile will return to the face of the patient on the very same day that cortisol dynamics return to normal.

Richard Bergland
The brain has all the characteristics of a gland except one—leaky capillaries—the sturdy brain capillaries are collectively called the 'blood-brain-barrier'. This barrier can easily be demonstrated by injecting a blue dye into an animal; every other organ (except the testacle) turns blue, but the blood-brain barrier keeps the brain as white as snow.

Richard Bergland
In the past decade, as regulating hormones have been found throughout the body, the soul has lost its home. It is scattered everywhere—in the brain, the gut, the ovary, the pituitary and the adrenal; if paracrinologists are correct, every cell contains the well-chiselled molecules that give life to the soul and guidance to the mind.

Richard Bergland
Regulatory messages or hormones flow from specific regions of the brain to specific glands within 'hollow' nerve fibres exactly as Erasistratus, Galen and Descartes had taught.

Richard Bergland
Gone are the days when scientists believed one hormone was made by one gland. Insulin, for example... is made in other surprising places, like the brain, and even by tiny one-cell organisms without a pancreas.

Richard Bergland
Genetic engineers are powerless in all of this without some cooperative effort from people working in allied fields.

Richard Bergland
Many endocrine diseases of the body entail the production of 'crooked molecules'—molecules that are made in the wrong way by the cell. It is fairly common for a cancer cell to begin the production of a 'crooked' hormone that evokes dramatic changes in other body functions.

Richard Bergland
Somehow the same nurses, physicians, administrators and legal ombudsmen who prevented the study of the ventricular fluid of a patient with senile dimentia, or obesity, or depression, or schizophrenia, because of the risks, will encourage diagnostic tests and therapy for patients with epilepsy that are far more destructive and immutable than the measurement and manipulation of hormones in the ventricle.

Richard Bergland
Central to the paradigm that the mind is modulated by hormones is the recognition that the stuff of thought is not caged in the brain but is scattered all over the body; regulatory hormones are ubiquitous.

Richard Bergland
The belief that electricity, the fourth of the modern forces, is the stuff of thought has permeated brain science since the late 1700s.... while the brain was regarded as 'dry', all other organs were conceived as 'wet'. Doubtless the study of brain electricity helped in understanding the internal circuits of the brain, but it solved few problems of brain disease.

Richard Bergland
Some kinds of hormones, the 'steroids', pass readily into the brain, but the 'peptide' hormones produced by the pituitary, the gut, and any other glands do not easily pass through the walls of brain capillaries.

Richard Bergland
Pattern recognition is the sine qua non of the genetic code... pattern recognition underlies all immunology... pattern recognition is basic to all the hormone/hormone receptor interactions of cell regulation; and pattern recognition is the highest form of thought. It is the synchrony, the synergism and the spatial juxtaposition of whirling hormonal forces that give life to the human soul. Is this molecular maelstrom divine? I think so: it creates life, it is ubiquitous, it cannot be broken apart, it cannot be contained, it cannot be copied, it is eternal.

Richard Bergland