Richard Bergland - Hormones Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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