Top 80 Rahul Jandial Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Rest, you call that? The brain never rests. So essential to life are the myriad activities the brain engages in during sleep that without it, we die.”

— Rahul Jandial

2. “Sleep is not a suppression of brain activity. Quite the opposite. Sleep calls on deep powers of the brain never used during wakefulness.”

— Rahul Jandial

3. “Most of what happened yesterday, let alone last week or last year, is literally deleted from your brain at night.”

— Rahul Jandial

4. “One thing we know that humans and other mammals do during sleep is to transform short-term memories stacked up during the day into memories that can last a lifetime.”

— Rahul Jandial

5. “The brain stem is the portion of the brain that controls basic functions like breathing, sleeping, heart rate, consciousness, and pain sensitivity. Damage it and recovery is impossible. Miracles don’t happen after this area is injured.”

— Rahul Jandial

6. “The thalamus is like the old-school switchboard operators who direct a stream of incoming and outgoing calls to the right place.”

— Rahul Jandial

7. “You might be surprised to learn that fruit juice is almost as bad as soda. In fact, a 12-ounce glass of orange juice contains nearly as much sugar as a can of Coke.”

— Rahul Jandial

8. “Sleep is a firestorm of brain activity. Instead of taking in new information, our brain’s subconscious is occupied defragging, deleting, and storing the prior day’s doings for long-term retrieval; cleaning out bits and pieces of discarded brain schmutz; and presenting us with immersive 3-D virtual stories in which we are the star.”

— Rahul Jandial

9. “Although his brain had lost its youthful sheen, his mind remained razor sharp, teaching us that brain atrophy does not equal mind atrophy.”

— Rahul Jandial

10. “Being able to switch between two languages, the researchers concluded, improves a person’s ability to maintain focus and attention.”

— Rahul Jandial

11. “Nearly every millimeter of your body is penetrated by nerves that have been sent out from the brain.”

— Rahul Jandial

12. “The brain stem lies below everything else, a structure at the bottom and center of the brain that is no thicker than your thumb.”

— Rahul Jandial

13. “Hyperventilation during a panic attack makes people feel like they don’t have enough oxygen, but actually they have plenty. Their red blood cells, carrying oxygen, remain fully loaded: 100 percent saturated. But all that heavy breathing lowers the concentration of carbon dioxide – the gas we exhale. We actually need a certain amount of carbon dioxide circulating in our blood; if the carbon dioxide is too low, the brain responds by squeezing and shrinking the small blood vessels.”

— Rahul Jandial

14. “Silently, I mouthed the word to Demetri: “Epilepsy?” He nodded. I should have known: The kids were being fed a diet of fat, fat, and more fat. Only fat. More than a hundred years ago, physicians discovered that a diet consisting almost entirely of cream, oil, butter, and other fats could greatly decrease or even eliminate seizures in children with epilepsy.”

— Rahul Jandial

15. “Control of the pruning process is incredibly precise, and when it goes awry, neurodevelopment suffers. Children with autism, for instance, appear to have too many synaptic connections in certain parts of their brain early in life, and the usual culling that occurs in late adolescence is far less intense than that in children without the disorder. Perhaps, researchers believe, kick-starting the pruning process with a drug might help treat autism in the future.”

— Rahul Jandial

16. “The cerebral cortex is the bark on the brain – incredibly, less than one-fifth of an inch thick – where most of the magic happens in human beings: consciousness, language, perception, thought.”

— Rahul Jandial

17. “The frontal lobe plays a primary role in motivation and reward-seeking behaviors.”

— Rahul Jandial

18. “The benefits are due in part to the fact that a bilingual person’s brain must actively suppress one language when speaking another. Being able to handle that extra workload results in stronger overall control of attention.”

— Rahul Jandial

19. “Loss of sensory functions, in particular due to difficulties seeing and hearing. Studies have shown that age-related hearing loss is directly associated with cognitive decline, in part because the area of the brain that is supposed to be dedicated to higher-level cognition is instead forced to struggle to interpret diminished sounds.”

— Rahul Jandial

20. “The hypothalamus, located directly below the thalamus, is only the size of a plump grape, but it regulates hormones that control blood pressure, body temperature, growth, and more. It is a no-fly zone during surgery.”

— Rahul Jandial

21. “The undisputed fact of the Flynn effect demonstrates that human beings are capable of getting smarter, that intelligence is not determined simply by DNA.”

— Rahul Jandial

22. “Damage the frontal lobe, and you become an emotional wreck.”

— Rahul Jandial

23. “The brain, you see, is not a computer, despite oft repeated claims to the contrary. The brain is a living thing; much like an overgrown garden than an orderly filing cabinet. And mind wandering through your own garden of thoughts, memories, feelings and desires is a sure way to discover your inner creative self.”

— Rahul Jandial

24. “I hope I have conveyed to you the single most important discovery that neuroscientists have made since I became a brain surgeon: your brain’s health is within your own control. Your willingness to engage in lifelong learning, social engagement, and a childlike openness to new experiences will define your brain’s fate.”

— Rahul Jandial

25. “Amazingly, disrupting one frontal lobe can leave people functioning normally. It’s what both frontal lobes do in concert that sprouts our highest cognitive function: creativity.”

— Rahul Jandial

26. “If you think about placing genetically tweaked stem cells from one human into another, having nothing go wrong is in itself remarkable. Since cell therapy is in its infancy, this was an important result.”

— Rahul Jandial

27. “My family tries to follow the MIND diet but not too strictly. It’s big on fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish, and chicken, and down on red meat, saturated fats, and sweets. It is simple and delicious, but I want to emphasize that we use it as only a basic guideline.”

— Rahul Jandial

28. “The amygdala is shaped like an almond, and as with the hippocampi, there are two of them, one on each side of the brain.”

— Rahul Jandial

29. “But it takes the whole brain, working and communicating together, harmoniously and in sync – like a symphony orchestra or a football team – for creativity to happen. The spark comes not from any one point but from all the points uniting in a grand network.”

— Rahul Jandial

30. “How do you build a human brain? Given about forty weeks from the time of conception, nature decided eons ago to have a central spot for cranking out the billions of necessary neurons and then sending each of them on their way to migrate outward toward their designated permanent location. This radial migration is an astonishing feat of biological engineering.”

— Rahul Jandial

31. “Sure, practice improves everybody’s skills, and it’s absolutely essential in some fields. But are gold medals at the Olympics handed out simply on the basis of how long the athletes practiced?”

— Rahul Jandial

32. “The four lobes we discussed are just the lobes of the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain. Underneath, the axons and dendrites connect and channel the billions of neurons above to each other and to deeper brain structures below.”

— Rahul Jandial

33. “The hippocampus sits in the basement of the temporal lobe.”

— Rahul Jandial

34. “I’m all about safety, but kids need some risk in their lives to stimulate their minds, hone their individuality, and encourage their creativity. The era of helicopter parenting has gone too far. I let mine take a few bumps and knocks, free-range, and learn a little bit about risk from a young age.”

— Rahul Jandial

35. “Those cells on the outer lining of the brain, by the way, are the most precious ones.”

— Rahul Jandial

36. “One thing I am certain of, however, is that cell therapy of some kind – it might involve stem cells or CAR T – will eventually overcome cancer and other diseases of the brain.”

— Rahul Jandial

37. “There’s no question that the frontal lobes, the part of your brain pressing up against your forehead, are essential for any creative work. As the most advanced part of the brain, they keep us organized, motivated, and on-purpose in ways that nonhuman animals simply can’t fathom. But they can’t do it alone.”

— Rahul Jandial

38. “Episodic Memory is your recollection of events. Where did you go to kindergarten? When did you first meet your spouse? What did you eat for breakfast yesterday? And where did you leave the keys? This is the one that tends to naturally weaken with age. In fact, episodic memory peaks in your midtwenties and then slowly declines throughout life. That’s why you still remember the words to songs from when you were a teenager but barely remember the plot of a movie you saw last year.”

— Rahul Jandial

39. “Since the 1970s, in fact, the risk of dementia due to any cause has fallen by 20 percent every decade, proving that lifestyle plays a major role in how our brains age, and that dementia is not an immutable force.”

— Rahul Jandial

40. “Physical activity turns out to be one of the absolute best ways to maintain and even improve cognitive health.”

— Rahul Jandial

41. “To create the CAR T-cell therapy, we begin with T-cells taken from a patient’s own blood. Next we add the patient’s specific cancer receptors, making millions of copies of sensitized T-cells. Then these custom-built, supercharged immune cells are administered back into the patient’s blood.”

— Rahul Jandial

42. “And while it’s true that the amygdalae do play an important role in fear, they also do so for other positive emotions. It’s not the fear center, but it is an intense emotion hub.”

— Rahul Jandial

43. “Semantic Memory is general knowledge about the world, everything from who Isaac Newton was, to what a bagel tastes like, and where your office is – all the kinds of basic facts and meanings that computers and robots don’t understand. Thankfully, in normal brain aging, this huge knowledge base not only remains generally stable in an older adult but can continue to grow as a person learns more.”

— Rahul Jandial

44. “One interesting quality of NSCs is that they naturally gravitate toward any brain tumor. What if, our team wondered, they could be tweaked to deliver chemotherapy selectively to the cancer while sparing the rest of the brain?”

— Rahul Jandial

45. “That second concussion is the one to worry about. Whereas the vast majority of people recover from a single concussion with no long-term damage, those who experience a second concussion before recovering from the first are at increased risk of developing CTE.”

— Rahul Jandial

46. “42 percent of people shot in the head survive and do well enough to be discharged from the hospital within six months. I doubt that many of them do as well as Theo, but still, even as a brain surgeon, I find that incredible.”

— Rahul Jandial

47. “Synaptic pruning is the scientific term for how nature works like a master gardener, snipping stems here and there to permit other stems to grow and strengthen.”

— Rahul Jandial

48. “Surprisingly, though, cardiovascular exercise has demonstrated the least benefit in older adults. By contrast, Teresa Liu-Ambrose, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, has found that resistance training with weights improves cognition.”

— Rahul Jandial

49. “By the time this book is published, I expect that the CAR T-cell study will have already begun, with myself as one of the three surgeons. The brain cancer we will be treating is not glioblastoma, as mentioned above, but a different kind that is much more common: brain metastasis from breast cancer.”

— Rahul Jandial

50. “My philosophy is that they get fifteen hours to do what they want the rest of the day; they can give me sixty minutes.”

— Rahul Jandial