Richard Bergland Quotes

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

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

Whatever the cerebellum is doing, it’s doing a lot of it.

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?'

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.

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.

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?'

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.

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.

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.

Few would have predicted that the discovery of the circulation of the blood would have changed the way philosophers view the world, theologians conceive of God, or astronomers look at the stars, yet all of that happened.

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

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.

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 testicle) turns blue, but the blood-brain barrier keeps the brain as white as snow.

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.