Richard Bergland Quotes

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?'

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.

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

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.

Dandy's experiments were done in the fast lane of science... performed with no control animals, with no record of the number of animals operated on, with no regard for inter-species variability, with no record of the time base, with no histological correlation, with no attempt to quantify the differences and with no involvement with a neutral scientist.

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.

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.

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.

Every organ is a hormone-producing gland.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Brain/body relationships might depend upon a chorus of individual hormones... which are released together to sing hormonal harmonies to the body.