The brain is the black box: the final frontier.
Susannah Cahalan
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had to bring the idea of journalistic distance to writing about myself.
Before I was a reporter, I worked at a record store in New Jersey.
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.
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?
Redheads feel hot and cold temperatures more severely than anyone else.
It's hard for me to hear about the things that I believed during my madness.
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.
Read enough books on the body, and you'll find that reality is much stranger than any sci-fi series.
I was the first person in NYU Medical Center's history to be diagnosed with NMDAR encephalitis.
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.
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.
I believed that I could age people with my mind. If I looked at them, wrinkles would form, and if I looked away, they would suddenly, magically get younger.
Some people say how they'd like to live in different eras. Not me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My diagnosis had been discussed in almost every major medical journal, including the 'New England Journal of Medicine,' and 'The New York Times.'
To see my story turned into a movie is mind-blowing.
I never imagined while going through this horrifying illness that I would write a book or that it could ever be a movie.
To hear the words 'autoimmune encephalitis' in a movie is amazing to me, and I'm so proud.
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.
Be your own advocate.
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.
I heart Scott Baio.
When you want to write well, wake up at 5 A.M.
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.
I think people need to be comfortable questioning the authority of a doctor.
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.
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.
