Brain Cell Protectors Quotes

Dried oregano has thirty times the brain-healing antioxidant power of raw blueberries, forty-six times more than apples, and fifty-six times as much as strawberries, making it one of the most powerful brain cell protectors on the planet. ~ Daniel G. Amen

I often surprise people with the simple fact that your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA when it put two men on the moon in 1969. Computers are now powerful enough to record the electrical signals emanating from the brain and partially decode them into a familiar digital language. This makes it possible for the brain to directly interface with computers to control any object around it. The fast-growing field is called BMI (brain-machine interface), and the key technology is the computer. ~ Michio Kaku

I'm not afraid anymore. But I know that the terror exists. I know the kind of terror it is. You can't conceive of that kind. Listen, what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me - it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who's had some disease that's eaten his brain out. You'd have nothing then but your voice - your voice and your thought. You'd scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you'd have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you'd become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you'd see living eyes watching you and you'd know that the thing can't hear you, that it can't be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it's breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That's horror. Well, that's what's hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don't think I'm a coward but I'm afraid of it. And that's all I know - only that it exists. I don't know its purpose. I don't know it's nature. ~ Ayn Rand

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you tell me more about this 'profanity'?"
Mrs. Miller nodded at my dictionary. "I'll assume you don't need a definition. Perhaps you'd prefer an example?"
"That would be so helpful, thank you very much."
Without missing a beat, Mrs. Miller rattled off a stream of obscenities so fully and completely unexpected that I fell off my chair. Mothers were defiled, their male and female children, as well as any and all offspring who just happened to be born out of wedlock. AS for the sacred union that produced these innocent babes, the pertinent bodily appendages were catalogued by a list of names so profoundly scurrilous that a grizzled marine, conceived in a brothel and dying of a disease he contracted in one, would've wished he'd been born as smooth as a Ken doll. The act itself was invoked with such a verity of incestuous, scatological, bestial, and just plain bizarre variations that that same marine would've given up on the Ken doll fantasy, and wished instead that all life had been confined to a single-cell stage, forever free of taint of mitosis, let alone procreation.
Somewhere during the course of all this I noticed I'd snapped my pencil in half, and now I used the two ends to gouge out my brain.
"Guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh," I said, by which I meant: "You have shattered whatever tattered remnants of pedagogical propriety I still possessed, and my tender young mind has broken beneath the strain." N ~ Dale Peck

But strange that I was not told That the brain can hold In a tiny ivory cell God's heaven and hell. ~ Oscar Wilde

To think of them and memories with - on days with mood dimmed by some traumatic spell of a haunting quite residual - is to have the brain become a cell and trapped inside there is only the music of the surly sullen bell. ~ The Raveness

True love, the type that strikes you down and makes you change forever, you feel that kind of love in every f*****g organ inside you. Liver, kidneys, heart, and spleen. Every tiny cell what makes up your brain and your spine, your bones and blood and muscles. It keens through you. ~ Nicola Monaghan

Mental challenges cause an "adaptive response" to take place in the brain, just like a muscle. Challenges build axon-dendrite "transmitter-receiver" connections. Passive activities such as watching "reality" television do not stimulate or build these connections. We need to be actively involved with our activities, instead of being passive observers. Making and unmaking nerve cell connections (neuroplasticity) dictates how well the brain can handle stress. ~ Chris Hardy

I wanted to tell her how I truly loathed cell phones. I hated the way they made me feel reachable twenty-four hours a day; it was akin to having a chip implanted in your brain that tracked your location and told you what to think and do until, finally, you became completely obsessed with the tiny touch screen as the sole interface between your existence and the real world. ~ Penny Reid

Why are you doing this?" Clary said. "Sebastian, why are you saying all these things?"
"Because I finally can," Sebastian said. "You've no idea what it's been like, being around the lot of you these past few days, having to pretend I could stand you. That the sight of you didn't make me sick. You," he said to Jace, "every second you're not panting after your own sister, you're whining on and on about how daddy didn't love you. Well, who could blame him? And you, you stupid bitch"-he turned to Clary-"giving that priceless book away to a half-breed warlock; have you got a single brain cell in that tiny head of yours? And you-" He directed his next sneer at Alec. "I think we all know what's wrong with you. They shouldn't let your kind in the Clave. You're disgusting. ~ Cassandra Clare

Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, brain and spinal cord disorders, diabetes, cancer, at least 58 diseases could potentially be cured through stem cell research, diseases that touch every family in America and in the world. ~ Rosa DeLauro

But Amarantha rolled her eyes and slouched in her throne. "Shatter him, Rhysand." She flicked a hand at the High Lord of the Summer Court. "You may do what you want with the body afterward."
The High Lord of the Summer Court bowed - as if he'd been given a gift - and looked to his subject, who had gone still and calm on the floor, hugging his knees. The male faerie was ready - relieved.
Rhys slipped a hand out of his pocket, and it dangled at his side. I could have sworn phantom talons flickered there as his fingers curled slightly.
"I'm growing bored, Rhysand," Amarantha said with a sigh, again fiddling with that bone. She hadn't looked at me once, too focused on her current prey.
Rhysand's fingers curled into a fist.
The faerie male's eyes went wide - then glazed as he slumped to the side in the puddle of his own waste. Blood leaked from his nose, from his ears, pooling on the floor.
That fast - that easily, that irrevocably … he was dead.
"I said shatter his mind, not his brain," Amarantha snapped.
The crowd murmured around me, stirring. I wanted nothing more than to fade back into it - to crawl back into my cell and burn this from my mind. Tamlin hadn't flinched - not a muscle. What horrors had he witnessed in his long life if this hadn't broken that distant expression, that control?
Rhysand shrugged, his hand sliding back into his pocket. "Apologies, my queen." He turned away without being dismissed, and didn't look at me as h ~ Sarah J. Maas

....the challenge in following childrens' conversational twists is the leading cause of brain-cell loss in mothers. ~ Candice Speare Prentice

I look into Julie's face. Not just at it, but into it. Every pore, every freckle, every faint gossamer hair. And then the layers beneath them. The flesh and bones, the blood and brain, all the way down to the unknowable energy that swirls in her core, the life force, the soul, the fiery will that makes her more than meat, coursing through every cell and binding them together in millions to form her. Who is she, this girl? What is she? She is everything. Her body contains the history of life, remembered in chemicals. Her mind contains the history of the universe, remembered in pain, in joy and sadness, hate and hope and bad habits, every thought of God, past-present-future, remembered, felt, and hoped for all at once. ~ Isaac Marion

Biology doesn't know in advance what the end product will be; there's no Stuffit Compressor to convert a human being into a genome. But the genome itself is very much akin to a compression scheme, a terrifically efficient description of how to build something of great complexity-perhaps more efficient than anything yet developed in the labs of computer scientists (never mind the complexities of the brain, there are trillions of cells in the rest of the body, and they are all supervised by the same 30,000-gene genome). And although there is no counterpart in nature to a program that compresses a picture into a compact description, there is a natural counterpart to the program that decompresses the compressed encoding, and that's the cell. Genome in, organism out. Through the logic of gene expression, cells are self-regulating factories that translate genomes into biological structure. ~ Gary F. Marcus

Sam Temple kept a lower profile. He stuck to jeans and understated T-shirts, nothing that drew attention to himself. He had spent most of his life in Perdido Beach, attending this school, and everybody knew who he was, but few people were quite sure what he was. He was a surfer who didn't hang out with surfers. He was bright, but not a brain. He was good-looking, but not so that girls thought of him as a hottie.
The one thing most kids knew about Sam Temple was that he was School Bus Sam. He'd earned the nickname when he was in seventh grade. The class had been on the way to a field trip when the bus driver had suffered a heart attack. They'd been driving down Highway 1. Sam had pulled the man out of his seat, steered the bus onto the shoulder of the road, brought it safely to a stop, and calmly dialed 911 on the driver's cell phone.
If he had hesitated for even a second, the bus would have plunged off a cliff and into the ocean.
His picture had been in the paper. ~ Michael Grant

A major push is under way to figure out the molecular basis of those "critical" or "sensitive" periods, to figure out how the brain changes as certain learning abilities come and go. In some, if not all, of those mammals that have the alternating stripes in the visual cortex known as ocular dominance columns, those columns can be adjusted early in development, but not in adulthood. A juvenile monkey that has one eye covered for an extended period of time can gradually readjust its brain wiring to favor the open eye; an adult monkey cannot adjust its wiring. At the end of a critical period, a set of sticky sugar-protein hybrids known as proteoglycans condenses into a tight net around the dendrites and cell bodies of some of the relevant neurons, and in so doing those proteoglycans appear to impede axons that would otherwise be wriggling around as part of the process of readjusting the ocular dominance columns; no wriggling, no learning. In a 2002 study with rats, Italian neuroscientist Tommaso Pizzorusso and his colleagues dissolved the excess proteoglycans with an antiproteoglycan enzyme known as "chABC," and in so doing managed to reopen the critical period. After the chABC treatment, even adult rats could recalibrate their ocular dominance columns. ChABC probably won't help us learn second languages anytime soon, but its antiproteoglycan function may have important medical implications in the not-too-distant future. Another 2002 study, also with rats, showed that chABC can ~ Gary F. Marcus

Evolution sceptic: Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling. JBS: But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months. ~ Richard Dawkins

In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one's body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again. ~ Mary Renault

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. ~ Richard Dawkins

My cell phone rang on the table. I never went far without it, even in the house. I picked it up. An unlisted number. Oh goodie.
"Nevada Baylor."
"I need to talk to you," Mad Rogan said into the phone. "Meet me for lunch."
My pulse jumped, my body snapped to attention, and my brain shut down for a second to come to terms with the impact of his voice. I'd slap myself except my mother and grandmother already thought I was nuts, and hurting myself would get me committed for sure.
"Sure, let me get right on that." Hey, my voice still worked. "Should I bring my own chains this time? Or do you have bigger plans, and this is some freaky murder foreplay" - why did the word foreplay just come out of my mouth? - "and I'll end up cut up into small pieces inside some freezer at the end? I can just spray myself with mace and shoot myself in the head now and save you some trouble?"
"Are you done?" he asked.
"Just getting started." I was so brave over the phone.
"Lunch, Ms. Baylor. Concentrate. Pick a place."
"You seem to be under the impression that I work for you and you can give me orders. Let me fix that." I hung up.
Grandma looked at my mom. "Did she just hang up on Mad Rogan?"
"Yes, she did. ~ Ilona Andrews

Cell differentiation can turn neurons into everything from clocks that control circadian rhythms to photoreceptors that convert light into electrical-chemical impulses or decision makers that tally votes and decide courses of action. In the retina (often used as a case study because it can be directly and naturally stimulated), there are at least fifty different kinds of neurons specialized to different tasks, such as looking for motion, recognizing colors, detecting objects in low light, and measuring brightness and contrast. In the brain as a whole, there may be as many as 10,000 different kinds of neurons, each contributing to a different aspect of mental life. ~ Gary F. Marcus

Time dims memory. But not that kind. Somewhere in a corner of the brain, one little cell never forgets. It keeps the song that, heard again, recreates the room, the person, the moment. It preserves the phrase or the laugh or the gesture that resurrects a friend long gone. It knows precisely where you were and what you were doing when you heard about Pearl Harbor if you're old enough, or Kennedy's assassination, or Martin Luther King's, or the Challenger explosion. Every detail is frozen in memory, despite all the years. It keeps the innocuous question, too. The question that sometime later, when all the synapses are working, produces the epiphany, the moment when you're driving along and you realize that finally you understand. And why did it take you so long? ~ Kay Mills

Ahhh, my winter cozy woosah place to re-craft brain-cell recharge, and recreate; for the author & reader community...that place is a bookstore, and its cafe becomes a welcoming hangout, almost any day. ~ Tracey Bond

When I was going to school in, like, '84 to '88, you didn't have cell phones. There was no e-mail, if you can wrap your brain around that. ~ Tina Fey

Phosphatidylserine is a natural constituent of the cell membrane but is found in especially high concentrations in the brain. Supplementing with phosphatidylserine slows down memory loss and has been shown to reverse memory loss in some patients with age-related memory decline. It also lowers levels of cortisol, a principal hormone of aging. ~ Ray Kurzweil

Hebb's notion, as you'll recall, is that "when an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B or repeatedly and consistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic changes take place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased." Let's expand this idea a little so we can see how it might apply to memory, and especially to a memory of the fact that two stimuli once occurred together.

In order for two stimuli to be bound together in the mind, to become associated, the neural representations of the two events have to meet up in the brain. This means that there has to be some neuron (or a set of neurons) that receives information about both stimuli. Then, and only then, can the stimuli be linked together and an association be formed between them. ~ Joseph E. LeDoux

When you're in the more deeper stages of sleep - REM sleep, your body is quiet, but your mind is actually very active. So it's a time when your body and your brain is restoring itself. It's repairing any cell damage that happened during the day, it's really repairing, like I said, repairing your body, but also helps with digestion, helps with memory. ~ Shelby Harris

It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Soon after this incident the court rose. As I was being taken from the courthouse to the prison van, I was conscious for a few brief moments of the once familiar feel of a summer evening out-of-doors. And, sitting in the darkness of my moving cell, I recognized echoing in my tired brain, all the characteristic sounds of a town I'd loved, and of a certain hour of the day which I had always particularly enjoyed. The shouts of newspaper boys in the already languid air, the last calls of birds in the public garden, the cries of sandwich vendors, the screech of streetcars at the steep corners of the upper town, and that faint rustling overhead as darkness sifted down upon the harbor. All these sounds made my return to prison like a blind man's journey along a route whose every inch he knows by heart. ~ Albert Camus

Rachel hadn't invented the dangers of toxoplasmosis; she'd gone online and built an airtight case. This wasn't crazy talk. Neurobiologists had linked T. gondii to suicide and the onset of schizophrenia. All caused by exposure to cat poop. Some studies even suggested that the toxo brain parasites chemically coerced people to adopt more cats. Those crazy cat ladies were actually being controlled by an infection of single-cell invaders. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the "brain" of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of "other people," which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people ~ Philip Roth

Courage is about learning how to function despite the fear, to put aside your instincts to run or give in completely to the anger born from fear. Courage is about using your brain and your heart when every cell of your body is screaming at your to fight or flee - and then following through on what you believe is the right thing to do. ~ Jim Butcher

Don't you know alcohol kills brain cells ... any damn brain cell that can't live through a good drunk deserves to die. You're doing yourself a favour, getting rid of all them nonhacking, underachieving ones. I'm working on improving your efficiency. ~ James E. Webb

Concepts of memory tend to reflect the technology of the times. Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again. These days, we tend to think of memory as a camera or a video recorder, filming, storing, and recycling the vast troves of data we accumulate throughout our lives. In practice, though, every memory we retain depends upon a chain of chemical interactions that connect millions of neurons to one another. Those neurons never touch; instead, they communicate through tiny gaps, or synapses, that surround each of them. Every neuron has branching filaments, called dendrites, that receive chemical signals from other nerve cells and send the information across the synapse to the body of the next cell. The typical human brain has trillions of these connections. When we learn something, chemicals in the brain strengthen the synapses that connect neurons. Long-term memories, built from new proteins, change those synaptic networks constantly; inevitably, some grow weaker and others, as they absorb new information, grow more powerful. ~ Michael Specter

This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one. ~ Primo Levi

The ultimate work of energy production is accomplished not in any specialized organ but in every cell of the body. A living cell, like a flame, burns fuel to produce the energy on which life depends. The analogy is more poetic than precise, for the cell accomplishes its 'burning' with only the moderate heat of the body's normal temperature. Yet all these billions of gently burning little fires spark the energy of life. Should they cease to burn, 'no heart could beat, no plant could grow upward defying gravity, no amoeba could swim, no sensation could speed along a nerve, no thought could flash in the human brain,' said the chemist Eugene Rabinowitch. ~ Rachel Carson

Sure I have a cell-phone, so I don't have to remember everyone's number anymore, but that really wasn't a core part of my brain. ~ Ken Jennings

Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding. ~ David Eagleman

Have you ever looked at a map of our country, Necdet?' Green Headscarf says. 'It's a map of the human mind. We're split by water over two continents, Europe and Anatolia. We are seven per cent Europe, ninety-three per cent Asia. Conscious Thrace, unconscious, pre-conscious, sub-concious Anatolia. And Istanbul - have you ever seen a neuron, Necdet? A brain cell? The marvel is that the synapses don't touch. There is always a gap - there must a gap, otherwise consciousness would not exist. The Bosphorus is that synaptic cleft. Potential can flow across the cleft. It's the cleft that makes consciousness possible. ~ Ian McDonald

Stored away in some brain cell is the image of a long-departed aunt you haven't thought of in 30 years. Stored away in another cell is the image of a pink pony stitched on your first set of baby pajamas. All it takes to get that aunt mounted on the back of that pony is to eat a hunk of meatloaf immediately before going to bed. ~ Robert Breault

What Positive Input Does Promotes overall balance, or homeostasis. Moves easily through the system, without obstruction or blockages. Generates new neural pathways. Promotes the production of new brain cells. Improves gene expression. Allows every cell to function normally, without anomalies or aberrant behavior. Supports the immune system, increasing resistance to disease. Counteracts the effects over time of entropy and aging. Increases a sense of wellbeing: The person feels healthy, vibrant, and alive. ~ Deepak Chopra

Mind is not in any one place. Every cell in this body has its own intelligence. The brain is sitting in your head, but mind is all over the place. ~ Jaggi Vasudev

A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos… Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, you've committed a holocaust of potential human beings… Let's say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but it's morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we can't have this dialogue in the way that we should. I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intu ~ Sam Harris

My scratching I don't really think communicates to intelligent life forms. Anyone with more than one brain cell would think Kid Koala music is completely retarded. ~ Eric San

At the time that he had seriously begun to consolidate his organization, Parker was working in a custom photo lab. The reader who is not much taken by audiovisual pastimes may have a deficient picture of that place where Parker was employed; or perhaps not so much a deficient picture--the dyes faded, shoddily spotted, brutishly burned in and doltishly dodged by subhuman technicians under the glare of the enlargers--as an image which had been misfiled in the archives of the memory, representing instead one of those bleak Photo Drive-Ups and Presto Printses located nowadays on the corner of almost every large parking lot, in which the clerks wait sadly behind their glass counters, but no one comes in, and the air becomes darker and darker over the course of the morning as a result of exhaust fumes (there goes another brain cell; ping! - THAT thought will never be completed now); and the pink chubby tots smiling at your from the walls in sample enlargements become steadily more grimy, and by the lunch break they are brown; and the day ticks off on the loud digital clock; and then finally a car creeps into the lot, and a popeyed couple locks that vehicle doors listlessly; they request a reprint of a washed-out snapshot of their son who was killed in the Indian Wars, and they go away; and after a long time here comes a slick-haired teenager who once took a few pix of his girlfriend holding a balloon at the zoo in front of the monkey cage on a dirty overcast day, and the clerk can ~ William T. Vollmann

The full sequence of communication between neurons is thus usually electrical-chemical-electrical: electrical signals coming down axons get converted into chemical messages that help trigger electrical signals in the next cell. There are also synapses through which communication between presynaptic and postsynaptic sites is purely electrical, but chemical transmission is the more prevalent form. Thus, much of what the brain does involves electrical-to-chemical-to-electrical coding of experience. As hard as it may be to imagine, electrochemical conversations between neurons make possible all of the wondrous (and sometimes dreadful) accomplishments of human minds. Your very understanding that the brain works this way is itself an electrochemical event. ~ Joseph E. LeDoux