Why do people with dementia forget things like people/events, but not things like the alphabet or relatively simple grammar? Or do they, and it’s just not really shown in western media?

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Why do people with dementia forget things like people/events, but not things like the alphabet or relatively simple grammar? Or do they, and it’s just not really shown in western media?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It can depend on the type of dementia e.g Alzheimer’s, lewy body, vascular etc. They affect different regions of the brain and in different ways. Also short term memory tends to go before long term so even if the affected individual has known you for say 30 years, they have known the alphabet a lot longer.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Principle of “first in, last out”. Alzheimer’s progression slowly erodes your memories and takes things you’ve learned more recently first. So older memories stay longest and in a sense people with Alzheimer’s are moving backward in time. You’ll find that things they learned in childhood stay the longest, but eventually the progression of the disease will take those memories too. In the end they revert back to being in a sense like infants again, who are no longer able to perform basic actions of self care. That’s why Alzheimer’s patients will not know their children but will still have manners, know grammar and their ABCs.

Anonymous 0 Comments

My non-neurologist’s observation is: people with dementia seem to remember older, well-established memories more than recent events. It’s the older ones that contribute most to their lifetime of personality layers. I have two examples from my direct family:

First, my grandmother died at 94 and had pretty much lost her short term memory by then. You might have to repeat new information several times in a row and it still wouldn’t stick. When my wife and I were just married, right after the wedding we visited her in her nursing home and gave her a framed wedding photo as a gift. She pulled the gift out of the bag several times, and each time it was a new experience for her.

But then, a year and a half later when our kid was born, we visited her again with the two-month-old infant. She immediately took the baby and held her, and started singing a Frisian-language lullaby to her. She was the daughter of Dutch immigrants, and Frisian was a language that she was exposed to during her childhood — but nobody in our family had ever heard her speak it as an adult. That childhood lullaby was still incredibly foundational to what was left of her memory.

Second: my dad died last year of mixed dementia (part Alzheimer’s, part vascular). Towards the end he was really interested in going out to check on his parents — but he didn’t remember that his parents were both gone, and he didn’t remember that he lived four hours’ drive away from where they used to.

He also seemed to remember meeting Harry Belafonte when he was in college … but the details of that memory got mixed up. The story morphed into “whichever celebrity was on TV at the time”.

Disclaimer, I’m not a neurologist but this seems to be a common pattern in stories I’ve read.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I find that the media portrays dementia and alzheimers in what I would consider a “glorified” manner, perhaps the most sugar-coated way they can. Because dementia is ugly and painful, but the media doesn’t always portray it like that. People do forget words and grammar, but it all depends on the person and how their particular case progresses.

My grandfather was a wise navy veteran, always had a funny story to tell, gentle as could be (unless you messed with his kids or his grandbabies). When his dementia really set it, he would often become so combative that they had to call law enforcement because he would find knives and try to go after the family. And then he started forgetting. Dates, events, birthdays, anniversaries. Then he’d forget his grandkids, then his kids, and eventually his own wife. From there he couldn’t remember questions he’d just asked, places he’d just been, things he’d said or done 30 seconds prior. I remember him coming to visit once and he kept asking me, maybe every minute or so, “Is this your home? It’s a lovely home.” (It took everything in me to not break down in tears.) Eventually words started disappearing. It was like he was reverting in age until he had the vocabulary of a toddler.

Like I said. Each individual is different, but yes, it does happen.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are many types of dementia. Alzheimer’s is but one. People are affected differently. My mom had dementia. She was “pleasantly demented”. That’s the term. She didn’t know where she was, but was always happy. Alzheimer’s patients are often angry. I think she knew who I was. I moved across country, and took care of her for the last 6 years of her life.

Anonymous 0 Comments

My grandma has declined to the point where she is basically a newborn. No ability to speak or think critically. She is unable to do anything other than lay in a bed and be cared for. She is only able to make sounds like a baby would and flail around some. This is something that you don’t see on media at all. My grandma has Alzheimer’s specifically which is a form of dementia.

Anonymous 0 Comments

My grandmother had dementia and lost her ability to speak. It just came out a garbled yell everytime. Some doctors thought she could still understand us and had just forgotten how to form the words to reply. Others weren’t so sure if she had lost language entirely. She lost other motor control stuff so it was hard to seek confirmation. She definitely could respond to stimulus but we were never sure how well she interpreted the stimulus.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I will point out that there are considered to be three broad categories of memory, and a lot of memory loss will be impacted by this division.

The first one is what you usually think about as memory, and it’s called “episodic” memory. It’s things like, I remember the last time we came here, I remember my grandmother’s name, I remember breaking my leg when I was seven. It’s the people and events, like the chapters if your life was a book.

The second is called semantic memory. It stores things that aren’t associated with specific, individual memories. Rules and languages fall into this category. When you think of how to spell “apple” you don’t specifically think of the time you were six and were taught how to spell apple, it’s just information you have. It’s not connected to an actual point in your own past. (I mean sometimes it can be both, but that’s not required.)

The final is called procedural memory and it’s what people call muscle memory. It’s like how when you drive, if you want to speed up by, say, ten miles and hour as opposed to two miles an hour as opposed to fifty miles an hour, your foot knows what angle to turn at, you don’t have to like do the math in your head and calculate it. Your body has just learned, tilt this much will mean this much more speed. It’s one of the reasons it can be weird to try and drive someone else’s car, because your foot is so used to the specifics of your own car.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Just an observation, I’m a nurse, been working with dementia patients close to 12 years now. Obviously every case is different, but I’ve seen short term memory generally be the first thing to start slipping in alzheimers patients. There’s loads of other types/causes of dementia though.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are lots of kinds of dementia in different parts of the brain. Memory is in one place, speech in another. My grandfather lost his executive function, meaning he could remember facts fairly well but he couldn’t remember how to do things like make coffee or tie his shoes. He seemed reasonably normal and lucid if you were just sitting in the den talking, but he needed basically constant care to actually do anything useful. The brain is weird.