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.
Before I was a reporter, I worked at a record store in New Jersey.
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.
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.
I was the first person in NYU Medical Center's history to be diagnosed with NMDAR encephalitis.
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?
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.
Redheads feel hot and cold temperatures more severely than anyone else.
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.
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.
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.
The brain is the black box: the final frontier.
It's hard for me to hear about the things that I believed during my madness.
Read enough books on the body, and you'll find that reality is much stranger than any sci-fi series.
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.
I had to bring the idea of journalistic distance to writing about myself.
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.
