Top 80 Rahul Jandial Quotes (2025 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. “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

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. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Rahul Jandial

30. “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

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

— Rahul Jandial

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

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

— Rahul Jandial

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

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

— Rahul Jandial

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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