Quotes & Sayings About Neurology

The problem of neurology is to understand man himself. — Wilder Penfield

The Kingdom of God is an earthly experience which manifests in an unearthly manner. — Abhijit Naskar

It seems The Journal of Neurology reports that the longer you smoke, the less likely you are to develop Parkinson's disease. So what are they telling us? Follow me guys. Remember, a couple of months ago, doctors said drinking a glass of alcohol every day was good for your heart. Smoking prevents Parkinson's disease. Marijuana is good for glaucoma. Sex is good for your prostate. You know, screw health care. Let's party! — Jay Leno

Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects ... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy) — Oliver Sacks

Memory is the binding foam of our mental life. — Abhijit Naskar

My nephew has HDADHD. High Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it's unbelievably clear. — Steven Wright

judgment is the most important faculty we have. An animal, or a man, may get on very well without 'abstract attitude' but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind - yet it is ignored, or misinterpreted, by classical (computational) neurology. And if we wonder how such an absurdity can arise, we find it in the assumptions, or the evolution, of neurology itself. — Oliver Sacks

Biologically speaking, you are the child of Mother Nature, and neurologically speaking, you are the heirs of immortal bliss. — Abhijit Naskar

Neurology's favourite word is 'deficit', denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties). — Oliver Sacks

I emphasize this because some of my colleagues, for whose academic attainments I have great respect, argue 'You assume too much; this is not proved; this is not strictly scientific. We disagree with your neurology and your psychiatry is misleading, therefore you must be wrong.' My reply has been, with all humility: 'Yes, of course,' and I have returned to the labor ward to be greeted by happy women with their newborn babies in their arms: 'How right you are, Doctor, it is so much easier that way.' That is what really matters to the clinician. He should use the method that gives the best and safest result from all points of view until something better is discovered. — Grantly Dick-Read

The later-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, "How have I found myself here?" It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology. — Lorrie Moore

As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps - concentration camps, that is - and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable. — Viktor E. Frankl

To restore the human subject at the centre - the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject - we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a 'who' as well as a 'what', a real person, a patient, in relation to disease - in relation to the physical.
The patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient's personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined. — Oliver Sacks

I was fascinated by each area I studied, whether neurology, urology or surgery. — Tabare Vazquez

The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imaging the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.
Which is right?
Neither.
Both.
Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division. — George Saunders

She hoped I would send her some of my papers on neurology, of which I'll understand not one word, but will glow with loving pride at my ridiculous, brilliant and altogether delightful nephew. — Oliver Sacks

Recently, the search for what he calls "the splinters that make up different attention problems" has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or searing emotions than with its own internal "gyroscopic busyness," which consumes 65 percent of its total energy. Every fifty seconds, its activity fluctuates, causing what he calls a "brownout." No one knows the purpose of these neurological events, but Castellanos has a thesis: the clockwork pulses enable the brain's circuits to stay "logged on" and available to communicate with one another, even when they're not being used. "Imagine you're a cabdriver on your day off," Castellanos says. "You don't need to use your workday circuits on a Sunday, but to keep those channels open, your brain sends a ping through them every minute or so. The fluctuations are the brain's investment in maintaining its circuits online. — Winifred Gallagher

Nonconformists aren't just going against the grain; they're going against the brain. Either their brains aren't taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology. — Alexandra Robbins

Neurology and psychiatry should be treating the same organ. — Alice Weaver Flaherty

What the neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Women, churchgoers, and conservative were more likely than men, nonchurch goers, and liberals to disagree with the reductionist (neural) account of human life. — Andrew Ferguson

Which do you think is more valuable to humanity?
a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of "free will" can be compatible with determinism?
or
b. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society?
Of course my answer is b). — Jerry A. Coyne

It's been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn't made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain? — Abhijit Naskar

It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It's not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different.11 But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world. But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth - overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain - and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. — Sam Harris

Presiding over the entire attack there will be, in du Bois Reymond's words, "a general feeling of disorder," which may be experienced in either physical or emotional terms, and tax or elude the patient's powers of description. — Oliver Sacks

The [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind. — Steven Pinker

Fiction is a branch of neurology — J.G. Ballard

Planning. Short-term memory. Attention. At first glance, these three frontal lobe functions can seem like diverse activities that just happen to be packed into the same brain region. But on closer inspection it turns out that they are facets of the same basic phenomenon of 'restraint'. Planning restrains our brains from wandering from a chosen path of activity. Short-term memory retrains sensory cortex from moving on to different imagery. Attention constrains the kind of sensory data admitted to sensory cortex. — Robert Jourdain

Consciousness is simply the brain's neural response to its surrounding environmental stimuli. Hence when the neural circuits malfunction, Consciousness tends to malfunction as well. — Abhijit Naskar

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain. — Clifford Geertz

In this universe, all we perceive is a virtual reality created by the neurons. — Abhijit Naskar

Genesis prepared Samantha's intellect upgrade she was a plain, homely woman quite dismal in appearance, her eyes tarnished with the signs of fatigue like weary stars about to extinguish their light after their existence had expired. She was attempting to secure a highly sought after, well respected research post in neurology as well as seeking to impress a research professor she had her eye on and desired to capture his unsuspecting heart with her knowledge. — Jill Thrussell

The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and it's only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

The objective psychologist, hoping to get at the physiological side of behavior, is apt to plunge immediately into neurology trying to correlate brain activity with modes of experience ... The result in many cases only accentuates the gap between the total experience as studied by the psychologist and neural activity as analyzed by the neurologist. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

Memory is the coherence of life, that possesses all your emotions, and ambitions. Without it, your joyous as well as agonizing experiences of life won't have any significance to you whatsoever. — Abhijit Naskar

Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way. — Oliver Sacks

New developments in neurology provide biological explanations for how our learning is affected by our feelings.167 We learn best in stimulating environments when we feel sure we can succeed. — Richard G. Wilkinson

Even though it is common knowledge in our field of Neuroscience, I take immense pleasure every time I realize that our perception of the whole universe emerges from the activity of the little specks of jelly inside our skull. — Abhijit Naskar

Your brain secretly wants that song, because it's so familiar to everything else you've already heard and liked. It just sounds right." There is evidence that a preference for things that sound "familiar" is a product of our neurology. — Charles Duhigg

Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts ...
Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal.
Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats.
It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population. — Adrian Raine

NEUROLOGY: NEW BRAIN NEURONS FOUND TO OVERWRITE OLD MEMORIES — Anonymous

I guess I was sad that love was not real? Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad that love could feel so real and the next minute be gone, and all because of something Abnesti was doing. — George Saunders

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire. — J.G. Ballard

Look, you can't think of a person like it's one thing, one 'I' that decides everything. The brain is a collective, a huge number of all these thinking modules. It doesn't make a decision, it arrives at one. — Daryl Gregory

In a sense, habits never really disappear. Once formed, they always remain in our neurology. — Charles Duhigg

There were only 170 neurologists in Britain then and, whether spoken or unspoken, there was this insidious feeling. How can Bannister, a mere athlete, probably spoilt by all the publicity and fame, dare aspire to neurology? But I'd done a lot of research, and my academic record was very good. — Roger Bannister

I'm autistic and most of my children are autistic as well. Please don't tell me how sorry you are for me. I don't need pity. I'm just a mother who has children. Our unique identities and neurology make us who we are. We are perfectly fine just like this, thanks — Tina J. Richardson

We are but a bunch of neurons. — Abhijit Naskar

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine. In the early twentieth century, you needed only a high school diploma and a one-year medical degree to practice medicine. By the century's end, all doctors had to have a college degree, a four-year medical degree, and an additional three to seven years of residency training in an individual field of practice - pediatrics, surgery, neurology, or the like. In recent years, though, even this level of preparation has not been enough for the new complexity of medicine. — Atul Gawande

I may be in deep slop if the findings of a new study published in the latest issue of Neurology, journal of the American Academy of Neurology, prove to be true. The study conducted by University of Eastern Finland tested 1,449 people averaging 71 years of age and found that the subjects labeled "highly cynical" had a 2.54 times greater risk of developing dementia than those with the lowest cynicism rating.

I'd better tell my youngest son, Andy, about the study, too. I think he became a cynic before he turned 30, the predictable result of the massive self-administered force-feedings of the Story of Man in his pursuit of a Ph.D. in American history.

In Andy's defense, reading too much, too soon, of our track record on earth would make a cynic of anyone. Fortunately, his perusals have turned him into a champion of the underdog as well, another inevitability of historical research, particularly studies of our brutal conquest of the American West. — Lionel Fisher

The human brain takes in information from other people and incorporates it with the information coming from its own senses, neuroscientist Gregory Berns has written. Many times, the group's opinion trumps the individual's before he even becomes aware of it. — Alexandra Robbins

The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain's normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows ... — Aldous Huxley

The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions ... — Louis De La Forge

Soul is nothing but the functional expression of protoplasmic activity in the brain. — Abhijit Naskar

One of the awesome things about being a writer is that I can research nearly anything - tea? Bubblegum? Ants? Neurology? Chocolate? Textile production? It doesn't matter. It's all productive work. — Ann Leckie

Neuron is to Consciousness, what D.N.A. is to Life. Thus, Biology of Mind is to the twenty-first century, what Biology of Life was to the twentieth century. — Abhijit Naskar

I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization. — George Saunders

Reality is neurology, and is not absolute. — David Cronenberg

If I ask you, are you conscious right now? You'd go right ahead and tell me - yes. That's because your conscious mind is constructing an awareness in you about everything around you. And underneath that operation of your conscious mind, there are billions of neurons working in proper harmony. — Abhijit Naskar

Neuroscience is a science in its infancy. — Abhijit Naskar