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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It depends on the kind of dementia, but it can cause difficulty with speech, especially word recall. One of the most frustrating things for my grandfather, who had Alzheimer’s, was when he knew what he wanted to say but couldn’t figure out how to say it.
In addition to this, there are different kinds of memory. The memory we use to store skills and knowledge is different to the memory we use to store experiences, so theoretically you could have someone with dementia who is fluent in multiple languages, but can’t remember how they became fluent in them. In dementia, it’s the experience type memory that tends to suffer the most damage, particularly to more recent memories, whereas skill and knowledge memory typically remains more complete. Damage is also common to the way the brain creates new memories, which impacts both experience and knowledge memory creation, but is more apparent in how it affects experience memory creation since it’s easy to see if someone can remember what they did yesterday, and relatively difficult to see if they’ve learned a new skill recently.
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