Richard Bergland Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Every organ is a hormone-producing gland.

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

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...

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.

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.

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?'