Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I heart Scott Baio.
Be your own advocate.
The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess.
The brain is the black box: the final frontier.
To move foward, you have to leave the past behind
To see my story turned into a movie is mind-blowing.
Some people say how they'd like to live in different eras. Not me.
Before I was a reporter, I worked at a record store in New Jersey.
Redheads feel hot and cold temperatures more severely than anyone else.
I had to bring the idea of journalistic distance to writing about myself.
It's hard for me to hear about the things that I believed during my madness.
I think people need to be comfortable questioning the authority of a doctor.
I was the first person in NYU Medical Center's history to be diagnosed with NMDAR encephalitis.
Read enough books on the body, and you'll find that reality is much stranger than any sci-fi series.
We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.
Maybe it's true what Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.
I never imagined while going through this horrifying illness that I would write a book or that it could ever be a movie.
The first neurologist I saw just thought I was partying too much, and he stuck by that claim even after my family insisted that he was wrong.
Hormones get no respect. We think of them as the elusive chemicals that make us a bit moody, but these magical little molecules do so much more.
My diagnosis had been discussed in almost every major medical journal, including the 'New England Journal of Medicine,' and 'The New York Times.'
Sometimes, Just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.
Amy Adams is a lucky woman. Not only is she one of Hollywood's most talented actresses, with five Oscar nominations under her fashionable belt, she actually smells sexy.
It's hard to imagine a time when lobster pots weren't part of a well-equipped kitchen, but America's love affair with the two-clawed crustaceans didn't start until the 1800s.
The most dangerous age is 14. If you know any teenagers, this might not come as a surprise, but research has confirmed that risk-taking peaks during this exact moment in mid-adolescence.
When 'Brain on Fire' premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016, I fixated on inconsequential things like what dress I would wear and how much weight I wanted to lose. I lost my perspective.
In the world of online invitations, nothing is sacred. People will invite all 500 of their 'closest' friends to their birthday party - and 485 of those people will RSVP 'yes' without intending to show up.
In Greek myth, a chimera is a creepy combination of lion, goat, dragon - in humans, chimeras are one person who contains two sets of DNA. That's right. One person comes up in tests as two different people.
History is filled with weird but true stories of social contagion - from dancing manias in the Middle Ages to nuns pretending to be cats in the 19th century to laughing epidemics of Tanzanian school girls in the 1960s.
If an autoimmune disease can create symptoms that look exactly like schizophrenia, that raises the question, what is schizophrenia? And are there forms of schizophrenia that are caused by other types of autoimmune disease?
The true story of how my husband, Stephen, and I exchanged our first 'I love you's' - chronicled in my 2012 memoir 'Brain on Fire' - occurred deep in a hallucinatory psychotic episode outside a crowded Maplewood, NJ, restaurant.
My own medical history during my hospital stay was readily available to me through literally thousands of pages of medical records that outlined everything from my 'bowel releasing' schedule to the minute details of my brain biopsy procedure.
I knew something was wrong; I was constantly tired, and I'd developed numbness on my left side. I'd also become paranoid that my boyfriend was cheating on me. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. One psychiatrist told me I was bipolar.
I shouldn't have been diagnosed as swiftly as I had been. I shouldn't have recovered as fully as I did. I shouldn't have been able to write a book that did as well as it did, and that book should never have been made into a movie. Yet, here I am.
NMDA receptors are concentrated in the areas that control learning and memory, higher functions like multitasking, and some of the more subtle aspects of personality. When the immune system makes antibodies that attack these receptors, people may have seizures and violent fits.
For me, I think that there's a lot missing from the recovery or the post-diagnosis side of treating patients. Once the diagnosis is made, I feel that care drops off tremendously, even though it is precisely the time that a patient needs help the most, even if they are not verbalizing it.
We separate problems with the brain into neurological and psychiatric, and it's because it's stigmatised still. Mental illness is still stigmatised. Imagine if we treated people with cancer like that. Just because your personality changes and your behaviour changes, all of a sudden you are put in a different category.
When the brain is working to remember something, similar patterns of neurons fire as they did during the perception of the original event. These networks are linked, and each time we revisit them, they become stronger and more associated. But they need the proper retrieval cues--words, smells, images-- for them to be brought back as memories
When my disease nearly destroyed me in 2009, my doctors thought I'd be lucky to regain 80 percent of my cognitive abilities. When I was at my sickest, I couldn't read or write. I could barely walk on my own or groom myself. The disease felled me physically and mentally - robbing me, briefly but intensely, of my wits, my sanity, my memory, my self.
On April 2, the nurses started my first round of five intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) infusions. The clear IV bags hung on a metal pole above my head, their liquid trickling down into my vein. Each of those ordinary-looking bags contained the healthy antibodies of over a thousand blood donors and cost upwards of $20,000 per infusion. One thousand tourniquets, one thousand nurses, one thousand veins, one thousand blood-sugar regulating cookies, all just to help one patient.