Traumatic Brain Injury Quotes

To my mind, every emergency room should have a low-intensity laser for people with stroke or head trauma. This therapy would be especially important for head injuries, because there is no effective drug therapy for traumatic brain injury. Uri Oron has also shown that low-intensity laser light can reduce scar formation in animals that have had heart attacks; perhaps lasers should be used in emergency rooms for cardiac ~ Norman Doidge

Whatever I have to do here, I'm ready for it. Work hard, do my homework, get an A, get back home to Bob and the kids, and back to work. Back to normal. I'm determined to recover 100 percent. One hundred percent has always been my goal in everything, unless extra credit is involved, and then I shoot higher. Thank God I'm a competitive, type A perfectionist. I'm convinced I'm going to be the best traumatic brain injury patient Baldwin has ever seen. But they won't be seeing me for very long because I also plan to recover faster than anyone here would predict. I wonder what the record is. ~ Lisa Genova

Caregivers of those with a traumatic brain injury had their blood pressure recorded at certain time of day
at meals and during other activities, .. The blood pressure of the people who had adopted the pets went down dramatically. ~ Karen Allen

In my practice I use neurofeedback primarily to help with the hyperarousal, confusion, and concentration problems of people who suffer from developmental trauma. However, it has also shown good results for numerous issues and conditions that go beyond the scope of this book, including relieving tension headaches, improving cognitive functioning following a traumatic brain injury, reducing anxiety and panic attacks, learning to deepen meditation states, treating autism, improving seizure control, self-regulation in mood disorders, and more. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

It seems like it might go on for a while, so Tausolo takes a seat and looks around the sergeant's cubicle. There's not much to see, since the guy just arrived at the WTB, only a blank form tacked to a wall that looks like every other army form in the world.

"Hurt Feelings Report," it is titled. "Whiner's name," it says under that. "Which ear were the words of hurtfulness spoken into?" it says under that. "Is there permanent feeling damage?" "Did you require a 'tissue' for tears?" "Has this resulted in a traumatic brain injury?"

"Reason for filing this report," it says under that. "Mark all that apply." "I am a wimp." "I am a crybaby." "I want my mommy." "I was told that I am not a hero." "Narrative," it says under that. "Tell us in your own sissy words how your feelings were hurt." Finally at the bottom of the form:

We, as the Army, take hurt feelings seriously. If you don't have someone who can give you a hug and make things all better, please let us know and we will promptly dispatch a "hugger" to you ASAP. In the event we are unable to find a "hugger" we will notify the fire department and request that they send fire personnel to your location. If you are in need of supplemental support, upon written request, we will make every reasonable effort to provide you with a "blankey," a "binky" and/or a bottle if you so desire. ~ David Finkel

THE SECOND SPEAKER, ANITA SALTMARCHE, focused specifically on studies of light therapy used for traumatic brain injury, stroke, and depression. ~ Norman Doidge

We both laugh. I like the sound of my mother's laugh. I wish she'd found these pills when I was a kid, that I wasn't learning the sound of my mother's laughter at the age of thirty-seven and at the price of a traumatic brain injury. I look over at her pillbox. It suddenly occurs to me that she took many more pills than should be prescribed solely for depression. What else could she be taking medication for? I wonder. ~ Lisa Genova

Most people may not realize the tremendous value that therapy/companion/comfort animals have for the purposes of easing the suffering of those with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), particularly within the military. ~ Ken Wahl

My Miracle, living through a Traumatic brain Injury ~ Rodney Barnes

As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications. ~ Bill Maris

As the mother of a grown son with a traumatic brain injury, I couldn't be more excited about the prospect of finding out how to repair even a small part of the damage that changed his life. ~ Judy Woodruff

All we can do now is try to prevent secondary damage by relieving pressure on the brain caused by the initial injury. There is no reparative treatment for traumatic brain injury. ~ Charlie Cox

A team from Sydney, Australia, has lowered levels of these proteins using light. They implanted human genes associated with Alzheimer's into mouse DNA, so that the animals developed abnormal tau proteins and amyloid plaques. Then they treated them for a month with low-level light therapy, simply by holding the light one to two centimeters above the animals' heads. Using the same spectrum of near-infrared light that has helped in traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's disease, and retinal damage, they lowered both the pathological tau proteins and the amyloid plaques by 70 percent in key brain areas that Alzheimer's affects. Thereafter signs of "rusting" decreased, and the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells, improved their function. ~ Norman Doidge

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

You'll be fine. You didn't even break anything. You messed up your knuckles and your brain freaked out a little and basically you just fell asleep for three days. I don't call that an injury," he says. "I call that a god- damn vacation. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Idols of the injury,
dug in behind the least understood
motor plan information.
The vile abomination temporal lobes and
The four loathsome memory walls and
The four reasoning, arithmetic beasts
are found for all behind pain and planes.
Portrayed as a house,
Go in, function, cause blindness from
The house's hearing spirit, judgment and
The court's four bronze woes and
The functioning brain lobe wings,
Go in, hearing and perception,
I dig under door fronts, pain and plans. ~ Bill Ectric

The first time I was told that I had a brain injury, I immediately thought to myself, "I'm not crazy. ~ Amy Rankin

The neurosurgeon removed the right half of my skull. The swelling from the injury was so severe, it was causing enormous pressure on my brain, which if left uncontrolled would have killed me. ~ Amy Rankin

In common with many who have a brain injury, I initially lost my confidence and felt very vulnerable, as if a protective layer of skin had been stripped away. ~ Maryam D'Abo

As many know, brain injury comes in many forms. The two most prevalent brain injuries - stroke and trauma - affect more than 2.2 million Americans, and these numbers are expected to grow. ~ Allyson Schwartz

There's irony in a beautiful curl slowly turning into a tangled mess, beyond resurrection, in a matter of minutes. ~ Shelley Taylor

The number seven is magical, they say. Seven years 'til our cells completely regenerate. Seven years 'til Jacob possesses Rachel, no, Leah, and seven more for Rachel. Seven days in a week. Post traumatic stress often resolves itself in toto only after seven full years have passed. Such is the case for some brain trauma patients too. Seven. It's a number worth remembering. ~ Chila Woychik

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina's center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm's length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.
Leonard Mlodinow

The cells of my body store fear the way others' do fat. Every terrifying and traumatic thing I've ever experienced is still held within my muscle fiber as well as in my brain tissue. It pervades nearly every aspect of my life and influences nearly all my actions. Everyone thinks of me as being so brave, but I recognize my own cowardice in all I do. Sometimes I feel fear building up in my throat like a scream. ~ Damien Echols

Rape and sexual assault ... should be understood not just as a form of forced sex, they should also be understood as as a form of injury to the brain and body, and even as a variant of castration. ~ Naomi Wolf

The brain heals the past like an injury ... ~ Arthur Miller

The nerves of the skin send pain signals to the brain to warn us of the danger from and impending injury. In the case of self-inflicted wounding, this pain acts as the body's own defense mechanism to stop one from proceeding in the effort at physical injury. If a person proceeds despite the pain, that means that he or she is motivated by something stronger than the pain, something that makes him or her capable of ignoring or enduring it. ~ Steven Levenkron

The NFL acknowledges that repetitive trauma to the head in football ... can cause a permanent, disabiling injury to the brain. ~ Bob Fitzsimmons

I was sitting in my lab, my hand spread open on the table, while the skull examined my palm.

I'd worn a mark there for years--an unblemished patch of skin amidst all the burn scars, in the perfect shape of the angelic sigil that was Lasciel's name.

The mark was gone.

In its place was just an irregular patch of unburned skin.

"It looks like there's no mark there anymore," Bob said.

I sighed. "Thank you, Bob," I said. "It's good to have a professional opinion."

"Well, what did you expect?" Bob said. The skull swiveled around on the table and tilted up to look at my face. "Hmmmmm. And you say the entity isn't responding to you anymore?"

"No. And she's always jumped every time I said frog."

"Interesting," Bob said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, from what you told me, this psychic attack the entity blocked for you was quite severe."

I shivered, remembering. "Yeah."

"And the process she used to accelerate your brain and shield you was traumatic as well."

"Right. She said it could cause me brain damage."

"Uh-huh," Bob said. "I think it did."

"Huh?"

"See what I mean?" Bob asked cheerfully. "You're thicker already."

"Harry get hammer," I said. "Smash stupid talky skull. ~ Jim Butcher

Many „pathogens" (both chemical and behavioral) can influence how you turn out; these include substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal stress, and low birth weight. As a child grows, neglect, physical abuse, and head injury can cause problems in mental development. Once the child is grown, substance abuse and exposure to a variety of toxins can damage the brain, modifying intelligence, aggression, and decision-making abilities. The major public health movement to remove lead-based paint grew out of an understanding that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes children less inteligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive. How you turn out depends on where you´ve been. So when it comes to thinking about blameworthiness, the first difficulty to consider is that people do not choose their own developmental path.
It´s problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of a criminal and conclude, „Well, I wouldn´t have done that" – because if you weren´t exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, or physical abuse, and he was, then you and he are not directly comparable. ~ David Eagleman

As more and more people recognize the level of violence involved and the consequences of CTE [chronic traumatic encephelopathy, a degenerative brain disorder], they're obviously going to say "We don't want this to be a part of culture." And they overlook the fact that there's a huge swath of the populace where physicality is still a real common thing. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic. (229-230) ~ Norman Doidge

The people we love get under our skin and crawl through our veins and fine their way into our heart. They choke up our blood flow and mess up our breathing and tangle themselves through our bodies like wire. Like razors, like fire.
We remember them even when we don't remember them.
We try and forget, but it's pointless.
Even amnesia. Even comas and brain damage and traumatic shock.
Whatever makes us not remember, we still remember.
Our minds flounder like fish but our bodies...
Our bodies remember. ~ Katrina Leno

Rape wounds deeply, splits open
your core with shrapnel.
The stench of the injury attracts maggots
which hatch into clouds of doubt and self-loathing
the dirt you feel inside you nourishes
anxiety, depression, and shame
poisoning your blood, festering
in your brain until you will do anything to stop
feeling the darkness rising within
anything
to stop feeling–

untreated pain
is a cancer of the soul
that can kill you ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. ~ Martin Amis

Maybe when I'd wrecked I had hit my head. Could that be it? Did I have a brain injury? Was I hallucinating? I didn't believe that. ~ A.B. Shepherd

There may not be any romance to mental illness but who needs romance when the preferable route is agency? The prevailing conversation around mental health issues is agency and the lack thereof on the part of the mentally ill. But what do you do if you're a paid-up member of the mentally ill populace in question? Do you curl up into a ball and give up? No, you look for solutions. Ultimately, it's about keeping despair at bay and sometimes simple things like running, taking up a hobby, doing charity work, painting or, in my case, writing can be a galvanizing part of the recovery process. Keeping the brain and the body active can give life a semblance of pleasure and hope. This is what writing has done for me. I took every traumatic element of my condition and channelled it into something useful. ~ Diriye Osman

Look, Lynch," Kavinsky said. "It's simple. Wrap your tiny Celtic brain around this concept. What did your mom do when your goldfish died?"
Ronan stopped pacing. "I told you. It's not your rice rocket. I can get him another but it won't be the same. He doesn't want another one, he wants this one."
"I'm going to be fucking patient with you," Kavinsky said, "because you've had a head injury. You're not listening to the words I say."
Ronan threw a hand toward the Pig. "This is not a goldfish. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

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

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body - or without the body, they would have been the same ... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence. ~ Charles Lamb

Continuous scans of the brain to measure changes in blood flow) could control a robot hundreds of miles away just by imagining moving different parts of his body. The subject could see from the robot's perspective, thanks to a camera on its head, and when he thought about moving his arm or his legs, the robot would move correspondingly almost instantaneously. The possibilities of thought-controlled motion, not only for "surrogates" like separate robots but also for prosthetic limbs, are particularly exciting in what they portend for mobility-challenged or "locked in" individuals - spinal-cord-injury patients, amputees and others who cannot communicate or move in their current physical state. ~ Eric Schmidt

The inability to get something out of your head is a signal that shouts, "Don't forget to deal with this!" As long as you experience fear or pain with a memory or flashback, there is a lie attached that needs to be confronted. In each healing step, there is a truth to be gathered and a lie to discard. ~ Christina Enevoldsen

The holes are slowly filling up, and despite itself the brain will work until the job is completed. ~ Danny Scheinmann

A long iron rod rocketed straight through the very forefront of Phineas Gage's brain. It's kind of an unusual part of the brain: you can suffer pretty severe injuries to it and often walk away from the injury. It's not a part of the brain that's necessarily vital for your biological self. But it is very important for personality. ~ Sam Kean

As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam. ~ Cathy Caruth

Having a strong urge is like having a child throw a temper tantrum inside you, screaming "Hurt yourself!" But if you repeatedly ignore the urge's request and don't harm yourself, your brain will learn that urges don't work, just as a child learns that throwing a tantrum won't work. ~ Kim L. Gratz

You take a straight tip from the stable, Cokey, if you must hate, hate the government or the people or the sea or men, but don't hate an individual person. Who's done you a real injury. Next thing you know he'll be getting into your beer like prussic acid; and blotting out your eyes like a cataract and screaming in your ears like a brain tumour and boiling round your heart like melted lead and ramping though your guts like a cancer. And a nice fool you'd look if he knew. It would make him laugh till his teeth dropped out; from old age. ~ Joyce Cary

Here we see the word "brain" occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms "fracture", "compound fracture," and "compound comminuted fracture," all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains. ~ James Henry Breasted

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson's. There's no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing. ~ Muhammad Ali

It's worth knowing more about the complicated environmental and genetic factors that could explain why traumatic brain injuries lead to long-term disabilities in some people and not in others. ~ Anne Wojcicki

Sometimes people who want to understand Haiti from a political perspective may be missing part of the picture. They also need to look at Haiti from a psychological perspective. Most of the elite suffer from psychogenic amnesia. That means it's not organic amnesia, such as damage caused by brain injury. It's just a matter of psychology. ~ Jean-Bertrand Aristide

God began rewriting the ending to my life's story, our worlds collided with His, and He provided us with the most beautiful second chance. ~ Shelley Taylor

Down with ought with because with every brain that thinks it thinks nor dares to feel. ~ E. E. Cummings

When I am conscious that I am the master of my brain, I can actively process emotion and information. I develop the insight to see my situation clearly, like when a light bulb is turned on
in a dark room. ~ Ilchi Lee

It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity tat bloom to life speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, 'The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.' And yet, he continues, 'We know so little about it that even a child's questions should be seriously entertained. ~ Will Storr

Caffeine dehydrates the brain and body. ~ Daniel G. Amen

What I'm really interested in is this idea of a 'brain co-processor' - a device that can record from, and deliver information to, so many points in the brain, with a computational infrastructure in between - a computer that can process the information and compute exactly what needs to be restored. ~ Edward Boyden

All I can do is lie here, brain turning somersaults. It's nights like these when memories stir, whipping themselves into stiff peaks of pain. ~ Ellen Hopkins

GIVE YOUR BRAIN AS MUCH ATTENTION AS YOU DO YOUR HAIR AND YOU'LL BE A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER OFF. ~ Barbara Kruger

Translating is a respectable, valuable, creative and worthwhile use of a human brain. ~ David Bellos

He said when you use your brain, no-one comes near you for ingenuity ~ Sophie Kinsella