Robert Sapolsky Quotes

Long-term memory involves enduring changes that result from the growth of new synaptic connections.

I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer's disease where they slowly began to recover other people's lost memories.

Alzheimer's disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

Although there have been warnings that it was coming for years, the Alzheimer's epidemic is here now and millions more families will be touched by this progressive - and ultimately fatal - disease unless its course can be altered.

I became demented overnight. Sudden onset is one factor that distinguishes my form of dementia from the more common form associated with Alzheimer's disease.

It turns out that this part of the brain is one of the first areas that's attacked by Alzheimer's disease. So we can now use some of the basic understanding of this part of the brain to ask the simple question, 'What is going wrong with these special cells in the hippocampus at the very earliest stages?'

My mother, who died aged 82, had Alzheimer's. Losing your memory is bad enough, but everything shuts down. You can't remember how to eat or go to the toilet. It's a terrible disease and so distressing to watch it take over someone you love.

Each form of Alzheimer's disease should perturb different brain networks and so influence the concentration of different proteins that can be measured in the blood.

When I was a medical student in the 1950s, we practically never spoke about Alzheimer's disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn't live long enough to have Alzheimer's disease.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases - one was Alzheimer's, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer's.

I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

People do not realize that Alzheimer's is not old age. It is a progressive and fatal disease and staggering amounts of people develop Alzheimer's every day.

You could double the number of synaptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a result of experience and learning. The reason for that was that long-term memory alters the expression of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections.

Even slight elevations in blood sugar have been shown to increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

With Alzheimer's, recent memory is affected first. At the start, you count the memory loss in days, then hours - then in minutes. But there's also an insidious backward creep of deterioration.

I am particularly interested in Alzheimer's disease and have been for some time now.

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.

Most Alzheimer's sufferers aren't diagnosed until their 70s. However, we now know that their brains began deteriorating long before that.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.

I don't know a great deal about Alzheimer's - just what it does.

The brain is such an incredible computer.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

The thought of having sclerosis of the synapses is alarming. I wonder if in later life I will pay the price for having overstimulated my mental apparatus in my twenties.