The Root of Thought Quotes

“Glia are not glue or inconsequential space; it is now turning out to be the exact opposite. Rodin’s thinker was certainly using his”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“When looking at the brains of injured patients, Paul Broca (1824–1880) discovered that the left temporal cortex was responsible for speech. When Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of patients undergoing surgery, he confirmed the function of speech was in the left temporal lobe. We know that the motor cortex lies at the front of the brain in a strip along the midline. Sensory processing from the skin lies just to the back of the”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“If the skeptics are correct, then the astrocyte might prove to be responsible at the learning level.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“percent of the rodent brain and 90 percent of the human brain. The ratio of cell number of astrocytes in the cortex increases as the intellect of the animal increases. The mouse has about .3 astrocytes for every 1 neuron. In the human, 1.65 astrocytes to 1 neuron are in the cortex. In fact, the increasing number of astrocytes correlates with the considered intellect of the species.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“The leech is more developed than the flatworm, with one glial cell for every 30 neurons, and the glial cells occupying 51 percent of the nervous system space.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“Many degenerative diseases of the brain, especially Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) have a curious aspect. In all of them, the first thing to go is the sense of smell. Why smell? No one knows. Many reasons for this might exist—the disease somehow attacks the neurons transmitting the sense of smell into the brain. Maybe some primitive evolutionary imprint has left its mark on our nose and it just gives up when the brain begins to degenerate in any area. However, we are taught that in Alzheimer’s, the point of attack is the hippocampus, which is the area responsible for forming new memories—the area cut out of Brenda Milner’s famous patient HM. In Parkinson’s, the debilitated area is the basal ganglia, and particularly the substantia nigra, an area that helps control movement.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“Some of the worst names in the history of science have come about as we enter the era of biology concerned with genes and proteins. We are subjected to the uniform naming of these poor structures, an idea that usually backfires as researchers realize the protein doesn’t do what they originally thought it did. A special place is in everyone’s heart for the guys that discovered a protein in the early 1990s and named it Sonic Hedge Hog after the Sega video game they were playing at the time. Even better is that it turned out to be incredibly important in embryonic development. There’s nothing more enjoyable than taking a class in biology taught by a difficult professor who is forced to say Sonic Hedge Hog 30 times in 15 minutes.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“Astonishingly little has been researched on glia until the twenty-first century.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“Blocking inositol triphosphate stops the wave. Inositol triphosphate receptor activation by calcium can desensitize the receptors. Inositol triphosphate is more sensitive to their receptors, but it is also less reactive than calcium and can act over many areas of the cell. Calcium and inositol triphosphate act like a hand on a faucet when they bind their receptors on the endoplasmic reticulum. After turning on the faucet, calcium flows out. The release of calcium from internal endoplasmic reticulum through these receptors results in sparks or puffs before it is sequestered back into the endoplasmic reticulum. These sparks or puffs can be amplified by neighboring endoplasmic reticulum as calcium itself releases more calcium stores. To get calcium back into the endoplasmic reticulum, energy must be used. ATP (Adenosine-5-triphosphate) is produced by the mitochondria, the power plants of the cell, by using energy from the blood. ATP consumption in the cell is similar to world oil consumption. It is the voracious creation of energy and power. Believe it or not, the ion that stimulates ATP production in the mitochondria is none other than calcium. When we eat and drink, our body breaks down our foods into energy. This energy is required for the mitochondria to produce ATP. Fats and sugars are broken down into units that are eventually utilized by the mitochondria transport system. When there is not enough energy available, calcium is unable to pump back into the endoplasmic reticulum and calcium diffusion can”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“Glial cells include Schwann cells, Müller cells, epithelial cells, ependymal cells, oligodendricytes, tanycytes, microglia, and astrocytes—all function as differently from each other as they do from neurons. Students of scientific fields always claim that learning new terms in the field is like learning a new language. Just as the meaning of an English word can change over time (such as plane, buck, mouse, and gay), the meaning of a scientific label can change after its function is understood. As functions of cells are understood, the labels have remained. Glia are capable of signaling and communicating, but they will always be referred to as glia (glue). Virchow’s “glue” label sticks because it was originally believed that a neuron was the only cell able to signal and communicate. As we can see by the confusing nature of the “planet” Pluto, it”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“4 Meet the astrocyte If you look at a tulip, you wouldn’t think it was an armadillo. Similarly, looking at a neuron, you wouldn’t think it was glia. But you might look at a whale and think it’s a fish, until you look at it closely and realize it has no gills and breathes through lungs. Then, you have a problem. Through genetic testing and excavations by paleontologists, we now know it likely originated as a land animal that took back to the sea and is related to hoofed animals like the horse. But before genetic testing and evolutionary biology, classification was based on appearance. This remains true for cellular classification.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“nothing was known about glial cells, the most abundant cell in the brain by a large magnitude.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“Little is known about the physiological properties of glial cells in the vertebrate central nervous system.” In fact, in 1966, absolutely”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“astrocytes, and Myron’s discus thrower was using his neurons. For the astrocyte to be the root of thought, it must be able to process sensory information coming from neurons. It must also be able to communicate to motor neurons to stimulate action. In the peripheral nerves, electrical impulses rapidly fire through sodium and potassium exchange to the muscles to cause contraction, electrical impulses we know as “action potentials.” Action potentials also carry information pertaining to sensory input from the body to the brain.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“When someone is told to speak, the area of the left temporal cortex is flushed with blood. Knowing that astrocytes, not neurons, have their end feet on the blood vessels, it is possible that astrocytes signal to neurons to fire to move the tongue in specific manner for speaking while also controlling blood flow to oxygenate themselves and neurons in the area. As sodium goes in the cell, neurons need oxygen in their mitochondria in order to produce the energy they need to pump out the sodium.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease

“midline. The back of the brain is the visual cortex. The parietal cortex between the sensory and visual cortex stores motor memories for playing instruments and sports; however, human verbal communication on the left side of the brain can also be visualized through blood flow.”
― Andrew Koob, The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia--the Brain Cell That Will Help Us Sharpen Our Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease: Unlocking Glia -- the Brain ... Wits, Heal Injury, and Treat Brain Disease