Receptors Quotes & Sayings

The money buys the drugs, the drugs work harder and harder to trick your blackened dopamine receptors into giving a damn about living. At some point you make a choice: fight your need the rest of your goddamned long-suffering life, or fill your need until it disappears into the grave with you. — Jeremy Robert Johnson

There are receptors to these molecules in your immune system, in your gut and in your heart. So when you say, 'I have a gut feeling' or 'my heart is sad' or 'I am bursting with joy,' you're not speaking metaphorically. You're speaking literally. — Deepak Chopra

Touch' is a multi-faceted concept, reflecting the different types of receptors. The simplest are free nerve endings which detect pain and changes in temperature; slightly more complex are Merkel's tactile cells (which detect pressure); followed by Grandry bodies, which consist of two to four tactile cells and detect movement (velocity); and the lamellated Herbst corpuscles (similar to Vater-Pacinian corpuscles in mammals), which are sensitive to acceleration. — Tim Birkhead

The Chinese sage Mencius made the analogy between morality and food 2,300 years ago when he wrote that "moral principles please our minds as beef and mutton and pork please our mouths."4 In this chapter and the next two, I'll develop the analogy that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. In this analogy, morality is like cuisine: it's a cultural construction, influenced by accidents of environment and history, but it's not so flexible that anything goes. You can't have a cuisine based on tree bark, nor can you have one based primarily on bitter tastes. Cuisines vary, but they all must please tongues equipped with the same five taste receptors.5 Moral matrices vary, but they all must please righteous minds equipped with the same six social receptors. — Jonathan Haidt

Unlike some other immune-system gene families, whose genes are all clustered together on one chromosome, the 10 human TLR genes are distributed between five chromosomes. This reflects the ancient, invertebrate origin of the Toll-like receptors, which were present before the two genome-wide duplications that occurred during the early evolution of the vertebrates around 500 million years ago. On the basis of sequence similarities, the Toll-like receptors form four evolutionary lineages (I, II, III, and IV) that are descendants of the four Toll-like receptor loci formed by these two ancient genome duplications. — Peter Parham

There are some who believe that perfume is magic. The fragrance of a thing is its purest essence. And certain scents can awaken phantoms of past love, of sweetest reminiscence."
"Phantoms?" Daisy repeated, intrigued, and the other girl replied impatiently.
"He doesn't mean it literally, dear. Perfume can't summon a ghost. And it's not really magic. It's only a mixture of scent particles that travel to the olfactory receptors in your nose. — Lisa Kleypas

In Molecules of Emotion, Pert revealed how her study of information-processing receptors on nerve cell membranes led her to discover that the same "neural" receptors were present on most, if not all, of the body's cells. Her elegant experiments established that the "mind" was not focused in the head but was distributed via signal molecules to the whole body. As importantly, her work emphasized that emotions were not only derived through a feedback of the body's environmental information. Through self-consciousness, the mind can use the brain to generate "molecules of emotion" and override the system. While proper use of consciousness can bring health to an ailing body, inappropriate unconscious control of emotions can easily make a healthy body diseased, — Bruce H. Lipton

Cannabis affects the brain because brain cells themselves produce cannabis-like neurotransmitters. The first such compound to be identified was christened anandamide, ananda being Sanskrit for "bliss." The proteins that transmit anandamide's message to the brain, the receptors, are mainly located in the striatum (hence the blissful feeling) and in the cerebellum (hence the unsteady gait after taking marijuana), in the cerebral cortex (hence the problems with association, the fragmented thoughts and confusion), and in the hippocampus (hence the memory impairment). But there are no receptors in the brain stem areas that regulate blood pressure and breathing. That's why it's impossible to take an overdose of cannabis, as opposed to opiates. — D.F. Swaab

Unborn children can experience pain even more so than adults as the baby has more pain receptors per square inch than at any other time in its life. — Sam Brownback

What if we are designed as sensitive antennas, receptors to receive love, a longing we often mistake as a need to be impressive? What if some of the most successful people in the world got that way because their success was fueled by a misappropriated need for love? — Donald Miller

Our cells stimulate our pain receptors in order to get our brain to focus and pay attention. Once my brain acknowledges the existence of the pain, then it has served its purpose and either lightens up in intensity, or goes away. — Jill Bolte Taylor

Oxytocin is an amino acid peptide. A hormone. They call it the love chemical. "So?" Kelsey gave him a dead-eyed stare. "So when you're further along in your pregnancy, more oxytocin receptors will be created in your uterine muscles. When the baby's big enough, your oxytocin level will rise, triggering labor, and will help your muscles contract so you can give birth." "Gross," said Cory. "No," Jack said. "Miraculous. Without the oxytocin, your muscles wouldn't be strong enough to push that baby out. But because of that chemical, you are. You'll be superhero strong." He smiled right into Kelsey's eyes. "Then, when you see your baby, that rush of oxytocin will help you bond. That's why they call it the love drug. And if you breast-feed, more oxytocin gets released, strengthening that bond. The maternal instinct is the strongest instinct in the world. Chemistry is definitely part of that. — Kristan Higgins

Angel, I have no idea how you can stand this stench," he said. "Derrel's been doing this for long enough that I think he doesn't have any smell receptors left, but you ... ?" He grimaced as he snapped pictures of the skull and the injury while I held the body in position for him. "You are one tough chick." Then his eyes crinkled, and even though he had the mask on, I could tell he was grinning at me. "Or maybe you're seriously sick and twisted, in which case you are so in the right line of work."
I laughed. "Gotta be the second one," I said. "I'm not tough! — Diana Rowland

Valkyrie stood there and waited for her to start making sense.
"There is a vegetable-plant hybrid we've been working on, modifying the genes and receptors, mutating the proteins and acids so that they are, in effect, neurotransmitters. Our work on the synapses alone has been quite illuminating."
Valkyrie stood there and waited for her to start making sense. — Derek Landy

Insulin binds to receptors on the kidneys, activates them, and signals to the kidney to release calcium in the urine, in turn, increasing calcium loss.234 Interestingly, a diet high in carbohydrates and similar to that advocated by mainstream medicine and the food pyramid leads to massive surges of insulin and increased calcium loss in the kidneys.235 — Colin E. Champ

According to Ramachandran, pain, like the body image, is created by the brain and projected onto the body. This assertion is contrary to common sense and the traditional neurological view of pain that says that when we are hurt, our pain receptors send a one-way signal to the brain's pain center and that the intensity of pain perceived is proportional to the seriousness of the injury. — Norman Doidge

If you feel depressed for an hour, you've produced approximately eighteen billion new cells that have more receptors calling out for depressed-type peptides and fewer calling out for feel-good peptides. — Chris Prentiss

Many studies link addiction to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a cortical segment found near the eye socket, or orbit.5 In drug addicts, whether they are intoxicated or not, it doesn't function normally. The OFC's relationship with addiction arises from its special role in human behavior and from its abundant supply of opioid and dopamine receptors. It is powerfully affected by drugs and powerfully reinforces the drug habit. It also plays an essential supporting role in nondrug addictions. Of course, it doesn't function (or malfunction) on its own but forms part of an extensive and incredibly complex, multifaceted network - nor is it the only cortical area implicated in addiction. — Gabor Mate

We're exposed and carry in our bodies multiple chemicals, and we have to understand how they interact. Both how they individually interact and the thousands of effects they can produce when they interact with the receptors that run our bodies. — Daniel Goleman

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains - cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I. — Peter Watts

The lights of London are burning bright across my retinas like we finally got our fireworks and I'm greedily breathing in Thea's perfume as it clings to my receptors and she wraps my soul in a heart-shaped box. — Andrew James

Maggie's long German shepherd nose had more than two hundred twenty-five million scent receptors. This was as many as a beagle, forty-five times more than the man, and was bettered only by a few of her hound cousins. A full eighth of her brain was devoted to her nose, giving her a sense of smell ten thousand times better than the sleeping man's, and more sensitive than any scientific device. If taught the smell of a particular man's urine, she could recognize and identify that same smell if only a single drop were diluted in a full-sized swimming pool. — Robert Crais

If humans are "intelligent," so is the rest of Nature. Native peoples have always said this. The human species shows its decreasing ability to communicate--both internally and externally--by its failure to recognize this intelligence. In this sense, our immune failures are one more example of not having ears (receptors) to hear the voice of Nature with compassion. — Neil Douglas-Klotz

She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she'd been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, "Hey Jude" was on the radio, it was her prayer, her manifesto, almost her dwelling place. She sang it everywhere. The music made her cry then; it makes her cry now. Listening to it now brings back memories so sharp they taste like blood in her mouth. — Abigail Thomas

Many people think that the high blood sugar seen in diabetes is due to a failure in clearance because the cells cannot take up the glucose in the blood for fuel. Even the textbooks say it. Glucose enters cells through a receptor called GLUT4. While the number of GLUT4 receptors in people with diabetes does not increase in response to dietary glucose as much as it does in healthy people, it this seems that this is not the major cause of hyperglycemia. People with diabetes still have enough of these receptors under most conditions. The major problem, as shown in Figure 10-1, appears to be the persistence of glucose production from the liver. — Richard David Feinman

Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.
Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers.Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks
call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex
and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks. — Ted Chiang

We do not perceive what is "out ther," rather we perceive what is "in here." Our senses can only inform us of their own status. They can inform us of the elesctrical status of neurons or the physical or the chemical status of the receptors. The outside world is never taken into our consciousness. The outside world is rather our own creation, psychologically synthesized from the mass of sensations that envelope us. In many respects, the ultimate question that perception must ask was stated by John Stuart Mill in 1865. He asked, "What is it we mean, or what is it which leads us to say, that the objects we perceive are external to us, and not a part of our own thoughts?" That remains, perhaps, the ultimate, unresolved perceptual puzzle. — Stanley Coren

When a male vole repeatedly mates with a female, a hormone called vasopressin is released in his brain. The vasopressin binds to receptors in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, and the binding mediates a pleasurable feeling that becomes associated with that female. This locks in the monogamy, which is known as pair-bonding. If you block this hormone, the pair-bonding goes away. Amazingly, when researchers crank up the levels of vasopressin with genetic techniques, they can shift polygamous species to monogamous behavior.38 — David Eagleman

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. — Neal Stephenson

Truth cannot be constructed. To live in ideology is, as Havel so eloquently reminds us, inevitably to live in a lie. Truth can only be revealed. We cannot be creators, only receptors. — James W. Sire

Even if they are teaching truth, all others who have claimed or been accorded prophetic status are still at best human beings on whom this call from God was bestowed. Their assignment is a given one; they are the human receptors. Jesus, in distinction, is the Supreme Giver Himself. He is "from above," say the Gospel writers. — Ravi Zacharias

Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors. — Willard Van Orman Quine

The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also - more so - for beauty. — Ellen Meloy

Nicotinic receptors are so named because they respond to nicotine, whether smoked or chewed, and they're spread throughout the brain. For all the problems it causes to our overall health, it's well established that nicotine can improve the rate of signal detection when a person has been misdirected - that is, nicotine creates a state of vigilance that allows one to become more detail oriented and less dependent on top-down expectations. — Daniel J. Levitin

When Rita asked Tabin to change places with her and operate on the next patient, he did his best to impress her, but the first incision with the point of his blade brought a grunt of disapproval.
'Try not to jab at the patient like you're killing a pig,' Rita said. 'Let your hand widen the wound gently.'
Tabin pictured the way fencers held their foils as they sized up opponents, swaying gently side to side, and attempted to send that image to receptors in the fine muscles of his fingers, so that they enlarged the opening one delicate cut at a time.
'Much better, Doctor Geoff,' Rita said. 'If you keep this up, you'll hardly blind anybody. — David Oliver Relin

The interesting thing about the miracle berry in chemo patients is that it actually straightens out their taste buds, whereas for you and I, it blocks our bitter and sour receptors. For them, it straightens them out to taste food as it normally tastes. — Homaro Cantu

Tactile receptors weren't needed to experience pain. Tone of voice transported those spores just as easily. — Clyde DeSouza

You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don't have enough dopamine to feel good. So then you feel bad and go back to the addictive behavior to get more dopamine. The strange thing is that it works with what we think of as uppers and downers and whatever you call gambling - sidewaysers. — Bill Nye

Confident people tend to challenge themselves and compete, even when their efforts yield small victories. Small victories build new androgen receptors in the areas of the brain responsible for reward and motivation. — Travis Bradberry

If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae. — Philip Plait

I think the deeper we go, the less likelihood we'll have of being recognised as something unwanted. It's like the human body - the greatest density of pain receptors lies in the skin. — Alastair Reynolds

Why does chronic self-administration of cocaine reduce the density of dopamine receptors? It's a simple matter of brain economics. The brain is accustomed to a certain level of dopamine activity. If it is flooded with artificially high dopamine levels, it seeks to restore the equilibrium by reducing the number of receptors where the dopamine can act. This mechanism helps to explain the phenomenon of tolerance, by which the user has to inject, ingest, or inhale higher and higher doses of a substance to get the same effect as before. — Gabor Mate

She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible. Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away. Only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all. — Thomas Pynchon

Scientists still know very little about how the olfactory cortex in the brain converts impulses from receptors into conscious senses of smell. But Harry wasn't thinking so much about the hows, he just knew that when he smelled her, all sorts of things started happening in his head and body. Like his eyelids closing halfway, like his mouth spreading into a broad grin and his mood soaring. — Jo Nesbo

Business of all kinds, over the centuries, had atrophied certain sense receptors and areas of the human brain, so that for most of the fellows taking part, the present-day rituals were no more, and even maybe a little less, than hollow mummery. — Thomas Pynchon

explanation of odor. "Odor is particulate," he had written. The sense of odor is triggered when particulates in the air hit receptors in the nasal passage and are interpreted in the brain. In other words, when you sense a certain odor, you are actually ingesting particulates (solid particles from the object you smell) that cling to the mucous membranes in the nose and give you that sense of odor. When you smell the decay of a dead body, you are actually ingesting particulates of dead flesh into your lungs. Dead flesh clinging to alveoli, the clusters of air sacs in your lungs. Jennifer had been so grossed out by his description that she had called him up and asked specifically about particulates. "Well, Sis (Jerry had always called her 'Sis') it's like this. I don't ever make coffee in hotels where they keep the coffee pot in the bathroom, and I use airplanes sparingly." Gross. — Enes Smith

Ugh, writer's block. The best thing to do is to forget about everything you're trying to do. Get away from your writing station, kick your feet up and relax. Then allow your mind to just wander. Don't stop it. Just let yourself think of anything, no mater how silly the thoughts seem. Remember, not to judge these thoughts. This will open up your creative receptors. You'll begin to think outside the box. Then the good stuff will start racing through you. That's when you start writing! — La Tisha Honor

Like daffodils in the early days of spring, my neurons were resprouting receptors as the winter of the illness ebbed. — Susannah Cahalan

We should credit [the sky] for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.

It breathes for us, and it does another thing for our pleasure. Each day, millions of meteorites fall against the outer limits of the membrane and are burned to nothing by the friction. Without this shelter, our surface would long since have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even though our receptors are not sensitive enough to hear it, there is comfort in knowing that the sound is there overhead, like the random noise of rain on the roof at night. — Lewis Thomas

My wife could turn to me and she may say, 'Why do you love me?' And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, 'Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors.' — Robin Ince

But the bottom line is that even though a cup of cooked beans may be listed as 225 calories, they actually give you much fewer calories per cup, a higher percent of protein, and fewer carbohydrates than show up in their analysis. All those listed 225 calories are setting off caloric and nutrient receptors in the stomach and small intestines, registering satiation and telling you that you have eaten enough. — Joel Fuhrman

I thought depression just meant that you're sad." "Well, in lay terms it does, but the fact is that long-term sadness is now known as clinical depression and it is directly caused by neurohormonal imbalance or the inability of specific receptors in the brain to function correctly. — Craig Hurren

I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight. — David Eagleman

Opiates are compounds derived from opium and include morphine, codeine, and a variety of related alkaloids. The term opioid is broader and includes all compounds (alkaloids or peptides) that have affinity for opioid receptors. — Alex S. Evers

I didn't just feel it; I recorded each and every sensation. I can replicate each one. I will. I'll play it back plus ten for the pastardthat caused my love to fall. And before they go down, I'll wet the concrete with their brain mattter. I'll explode their marrow out of their bones and make a mess of their capillaries. I'll make a paste of their eyes, Yasmine, I promise. I'll make them bleed from their ears and turn their digestive system against them. They'll digest their own organs. I'll increase their pain receptors so that their clothes feel like sandpaper. I'll make their own breath soun d like a DC-10 is landing in their chest. I'll fill their longs with every excessive fluid in their body I can find. I'll make a decomposing mess of them, I swear I will. They'll pray to gods they don't belive in for the pain to end before I explode each taste bud in their mough and inflame their genitals with the stray parasites they immune system usually fights off. — Ayize Jama-Everett

the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. Secular Western moralities are like cuisines that try to activate just one or two of these receptors - either concerns about harm and suffering, or concerns about fairness and injustice. But people have so many other powerful moral intuitions, such as those related to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. — Anonymous

We perceive and interpret the outer world through a set of incredibly fine internal receptors. But we are incapable, by ourselves, of grasping or tweezing out any permanent, sharable figment of it. Practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives. — Max Kozloff

It seems odd to think of tasting without any perceptive experience, but you are doing it right now. Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus. But only the tongue's receptors report to the brain. — Mary Roach