The Disordered Mind Quotes

“Specifically, damage to the left hemisphere can free up the creative capabilities of the right hemisphere. More generally, when one neural circuit in the brain is turned off, another circuit, which was inhibited by the inactivated circuit, may turn on. Scientists have also uncovered some surprising links between disorders that appear to be unrelated because they are characterized by dramatically different kinds of behavior. Several disorders of movement and of memory, such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, result from misfolded proteins. The symptoms of these disorders vary widely because the particular proteins affected and the functions for which they are responsible differ. Similarly, both autism and schizophrenia involve synaptic pruning, the removal of excess dendrites on neurons. In autism, not enough dendrites are pruned, whereas in schizophrenia too many are.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“How are psychiatric and neurological disorders different? At the moment, the most obvious difference is the symptoms that patients experience. Neurological disorders tend to produce unusual behavior, or fragmentation of behavior into component parts, such as unusual movements of a person’s head or arms, or loss of motor control. By contrast, the major psychiatric disorders are often characterized by exaggerations of everyday behavior. We all feel despondent occasionally, but this feeling is dramatically amplified in depression. We all experience euphoria when things go well, but that feeling goes into overdrive in the manic phase of bipolar disorder. Normal fear and pleasure seeking can spiral into severe anxiety states and addiction. Even certain hallucinations and delusions from schizophrenia bear some resemblance to events that occur in our dreams.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Consciousness has three remarkable features. The first is qualitative feeling: listening to music is different from smelling a lemon. The second is subjectivity: awareness is going on in me. I am pretty sure that something similar is going on in you, but my relation to my own consciousness is not like my relation to anybody else’s. I know you are feeling pain when you burn your hand, but that’s because I am observing your behavior, not because I am experiencing—actually feeling—your pain. Only when I burn myself do I feel pain. The third feature is unity of experience: I experience the feeling of my shirt against my neck and the sound of my voice and the sight of all the other people sitting around the table as part of a single, unified consciousness—my experience—not a jumble of discrete sensory stimuli.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“When memory is disrupted, these essential mental faculties suffer. Thus, memory is the glue that holds our mental life together. Without its unifying force, our consciousness would be broken into as many fragments as there are seconds in the day.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“The insula not only evaluates and integrates the emotional or motivational importance of these stimuli, it also coordinates external sensory information and our internal motivational states. This consciousness of bodily states is a measure of our emotional awareness of self, the feeling that “I am.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Consciousness is the state of awareness, or sentience. It begins in the morning when we wake up, and it continues all day until we go to sleep again at night, or otherwise become unconscious.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Moruzzi and Magoun realized that the brain contains a system—which they called the reticular activating system—that extends from the brain stem and midbrain to the thalamus, and from the thalamus to the cortex. This system carries the sensory information from the various sensory systems necessary for the conscious state, and distributes it diffusely to the cerebral cortex (fig. 11.3). But while the reticular activating system is necessary for wakefulness, it is not concerned with the content of conscious processing, that is, with the content of awareness. Figure 11.3.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Our genes are essentially an instruction manual written in a four-letter alphabet: C (cytosine), A (adenine), T (thymine), and G (guanine). Each word is made up of three letters. The word CAG codes for the amino acid glutamine and calls for it to be inserted into a protein when that protein is being synthesized. In Huntington’s disease, a portion of the mutant gene repeats the word CAG again and again, resulting in the insertion of too many glutamines. This expanded string of glutamines causes the protein to clump inside the neuron, killing the cell. We all have multiple CAG repeats in this portion of the huntingtin gene, but a person who inherits a mutated version of this gene and, as a result, has more than 39 CAGs will develop Huntington’s disease (fig. 7.5”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Carlsson went on to find that the early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease result from the death of dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra, although he didn’t know then what caused the cell death.5 Today, we know that those neurons die from a protein-folding disorder: the Lewy bodies inside dopamine-producing neurons are clumps of misfolded proteins that are thought to kill the cells. As the disease worsens, other areas of the brain besides the substantia nigra become involved.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Perhaps the most surprising recent finding uncovered by the large collaborative effort on the genetics of schizophrenia is that some of the same genes that create a risk for schizophrenia also create a risk for bipolar disorder. What’s more, a different group of genes that creates a risk for schizophrenia also creates a risk for autism spectrum disorders.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Disordered thought detaches a person from reality, leading to altered perceptions and behavior, such as hallucinations and delusions. These psychotic symptoms can be terrifying, not just for people who experience them but also for people who witness them. They are also a major cause of the stigma attached to people with schizophrenia.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“osteocalcina”
― Eric R. Kandel, La nueva biología de la mente: Qué nos dicen los trastornos cerebrales sobre nosotros mismos (Contextos)