23 Quotes by Thomas R. Insel

Neuroscientists talk a lot about brain circuits. In fact, the word 'circuit' is probably misleading. We do not know where most circuits begin and end. And unlike an electrical circuit, brain connections are heavily reciprocal and recursive, so that a direction of information flow can be inferred but sometimes not proven.

For bipolar in adults, I think there's pretty good agreement about what this looks like. For bipolar in children, there is some considerable debate about where are the boundaries. At the mild end, are these just kids who are active? Is this the class clown at the very severe - is this something other than a mood disorder?

After a century of studying schizophrenia, the cause of the disorder remains unknown.

From wearable sensors to video game treatments, everyone seems to be looking to technology as the next wave of innovation for mental health care.

My philosophy is really based on humility. I don't think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience, based on a much deeper understanding of the brain.

In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals.

As a scientist leading a funding agency for autism research, I think of autism as a neurodevelopmental disorder.

The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention.

Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function.