Richard Bergland - Brain Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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