Top 80 Rahul Jandial Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Rahul Jandial

3. “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

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

— Rahul Jandial

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

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

— Rahul Jandial

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

— Rahul Jandial

10. “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

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

— Rahul Jandial

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “To completely remove her cancer, I dissected through brain tissue that a little over a year ago had been irrelevant to her speech but that now mysteriously housed English. At that moment she was no longer bilingual. For the last five years, her scans have remained negative. She is cancer-free. We speak in Spanish.”

— Rahul Jandial

27. “But this is what I know: unstructured free play in childhood is a foundation of adult creativity.”

— Rahul Jandial

28. “The incoming fibers that carry messages from other cells are called dendrites. The outgoing fibers that send messages to other cells are called axons.”

— Rahul Jandial

29. “Cancer is not the only brain disease being targeted for treatment with living cells. Cell therapy also has the potential to replace aging or injured tissue. In this hope for regenerative medicine, modified stem cells are being studied as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.”

— Rahul Jandial

30. “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

31. “Those neurons that do survive grow larger over the course of childhood, resulting in the brain’s four-fold increase in overall size from birth until adulthood. The dendrites that stick around, meanwhile, slowly gain a fatty sheath covering them to improve their ability to conduct electrochemical signals.”

— Rahul Jandial

32. “So when trying to remember stuff, try to follow the lesson of E. coli and pigeons: Intentionally practice area-restricted search. Diligently scour your brain first for categories and then for items in each category.”

— Rahul Jandial

33. “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

34. “Starting in the third week of gestation, a strip of stem cells, called the neural plate, forms along the back of the embryo.”

— Rahul Jandial

35. “Procedural Memory is knowledge of how to do things. How do you get dressed in the morning? How do you ride a bike? Once learned, procedural memories tend to remain solid as a rock. Performance does tend to fall off with age due to the natural slowing of reflexes, although as of this writing, seventy-six-year-old Morgan Shepherd is still competing as a NASCAR driver.”

— Rahul Jandial

36. “No example of the brain’s capacity for self-reinvention is better demonstrated than in how it responds to having its left or right half removed in an operation called a hemispherectomy.”

— Rahul Jandial

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

— Rahul Jandial

38. “We repeated the mapping. English now inhabited a tuft of brain tissue that originally housed Spanish. Cortex that led to no speech arrest previously had now become critical for fluency. The areas I could safely flag with white were fewer.”

— Rahul Jandial

39. “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

40. “University in St. Louis. They have shown that after a single review of material, repeated self-testing enhances learning far better than does repeated studying.”

— Rahul Jandial

41. “It is true that, in rare cases, the effects of a concussion can last for months before finally resolving. Even more rarely, and for reasons that continue to puzzle researchers, some people continue to report mood swings, concentration problems, fatigue, dizziness, and other problems that go on for years.”

— Rahul Jandial

42. “Although it was once believed that motor control was the cerebellum’s only function, neuroscientists now understand that it also plays an important role in a variety of mental and emotional functions. Some now think of it as a “supervised learning machine” that refines thoughts and emotions just as it does movements.”

— Rahul Jandial

43. “Every great advance in music, biology, and astronomy, in literature and technology has involved overturning orthodoxy and doing what the experts said couldn’t or shouldn’t be done.”

— Rahul Jandial

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

— Rahul Jandial

45. “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

46. “Intermittent hunger clears the mind, awakens the senses, and improves brain functioning. Plus it lowers your blood sugar, reduces your insulin levels, and helps you lose weight by reducing total calories.”

— Rahul Jandial

47. “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

48. “Even when they leave for college, keep in mind that only half of all students who enter college will graduate. So keep on texting and calling – and visiting them in person. Their developing brains still need you.”

— Rahul Jandial

49. “Not only do 96 percent of children experience a total or significant reduction in epileptic seizures following it, but few show any significant effects on their memory, intelligence, personality, or even sense of humor.”

— Rahul Jandial

50. “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