Richard Bergland Quotes

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.

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.

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.

The brain remains silently separated from the noisy endocrine consequences.

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

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

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?'

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.