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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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.
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