Rahul Jandial > Quotes

“Being able to switch between two languages, the researchers concluded, improves a person’s ability to maintain focus and attention.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“people who spoke more than one language developed symptoms of dementia about four years later than people who spoke only one.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Most of what happened yesterday, let alone last week or last year, is literally deleted from your brain at night.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“your brain cells use more blood when they’re hard at work, just like your muscle cells do when you’re running.)”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Nearly every millimeter of your body is penetrated by nerves that have been sent out from the brain.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“But you don’t have to spend a week hiking in the forest to have your creativity nourished by the outdoors. Even a half-hour walk near your home, office, or school will do. Einstein made a habit of walking the mile and a half to and from his office at Princeton University every day. A little exercise, some fresh air, the passing of the seasons: it’s all fuel for your creative brain.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“The reason why education pays off is because of something called cognitive reserve: people with extra brain power (thanks in part to extra education) can afford to lose more before showing obvious signs of decline. That’s why two people who have brains that look exactly alike—with the same amount of shrinkage—can nevertheless show dramatic differences in how long they remain cognitively healthy. Those who put their brains to better use can withstand greater loss of brain matter.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Boston University’s CTE Center has established a “brain bank,” where former athletes with symptoms consistent with CTE can donate their brains upon death. Now with 425 brains, the center published a study in 2017 of former professional and amateur football players. Among 111 NFL players, the brains of all but one of them showed signs of severe CTE.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Boston University’s CTE Center has established a “brain bank,” where former athletes with symptoms consistent with CTE can donate their brains upon death. Now with 425 brains, the center published a study in 2017 of former professional and amateur football players. Among 111 NFL players, the brains of all but one of them showed signs of severe CTE. That’s sobering and frightening, but it’s extremely important to keep in mind that this study involved former players who already showed personality and mental changes consistent with brain injury. It was not a random sample of NFL players, most of whom never show such changes despite having experienced concussions.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“common misunderstanding about concussions: The well-deserved media attention to the plight of professional athletes who developed lifelong disabilities due to multiple concussions has led many people to think that even a single concussion results in permanent harm. In reality, the vast majority of concussions leave no lasting effect on a person’s mental functioning.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“different types cling to each other and literally crawl together to their destined home, moving at about 60 MPH (that’s microns per hour, or about one-five-hundredth of an inch). Most follow a path set by their predecessors, with each successive wave shoving and squeezing farther to build the brain from the inside out. Neither the destinations nor the timing is haphazard; each neuron must arrive at an exact location at a predetermined time.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Damage the frontal lobe, and you become an emotional wreck.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“To “trip out,” you have to trip up your frontal lobes. Although creativity arises from the frontal lobes, it almost always takes a backseat to the dominant responsibility of those same lobes: the executive and planning function that aims to get through the day as efficiently as possible. So with time, mental habits take hold that reinforce efficient behavior by forming preferential electrical pathways and networks, like freeways directing the major flow between major cities. What psychedelics are thought to do is to disassemble the freeways temporarily, leaving only a dense and evenly distributed network of roads. This dissolution greatly expands the diversity of connections and, as a result, allows unexpected and original thoughts.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Many people still don’t understand what I have since learned: that ECT, when properly administered, is the fastest, most effective treatment for depression and bipolar disorder when medications have failed to work. Up to 90 percent of people with major depression for whom nothing else worked find relief in days or weeks, and the effects on memory are usually ( but not always) modest. It is also sometimes given soon after the onset of schizophrenia.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“One of the key reasons that rates of dementia have fallen sharply since the 1970s is the advent of improved treatments for heart ailments. What’s good for the heart is actually very good for the brain. The steps you take to keep your heart arteries unclogged also keep brain arteries open. Cholesterol-lowering drugs have dramatically reduced coronary artery disease and are effective even in people who live sedentary lifestyles and eat foods that aren’t “heart healthy.” Statins, prescribed to lower cholesterol, have lately been shown to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in most people.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“fragmented sleep often felt worse than no sleep at all. And the morning after was still a full fourteen-hour work day that required as much focus as one could muster.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“along the way to their eventual home, they send out thousands of synapses and dendrites to their neighbors. By birth, there are literally tens of trillions of synaptic connections between the neurons in an infant’s brain.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“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, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance