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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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.
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