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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Your brain is a complex map of networks. Some paths to memory have many roads to access it and some have only a few or a single road.
Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease and starts destroying these neural networks basically with the accumulation of plaque.
Imagine Alzheimer’s as the bombing of a city and each road/ network is a memory. At the beginning even during the bombings you can still move freely through the city and only a few roads have been destroyed. Eventually your access becomes more and more limited. You stop being able to access certain locations altogether. Popular locations (long term memories) have many access points so for a while you use the backroads/other access points but eventually those get bombed too.
Given enough time, the entire network will be destroyed.
That’s why it’s important to build large and sustainable cities of memories and neural networks. The more you learn and challenge yourself in life and stay healthy, you give your brain a better chance to sustain an attack. A person with a limited educational background is at higher risk of the disease.
Because imagine you have a small rural town compared to a huge urban metropolis. If both of those places start having a few bombs the rural town might be completely decimated very quickly while in the metropolis it could very well go unnoticed for a long time (and in a metropolis new roads would be being regularly built so they might even outpace the bombing altogether); ie some people will live a full life never knowing they even had the disease. They’ve discovered brains at autopsy that were riddled with plaque yet the person had no immediate symptoms/ impaired memory loss. Which means they had a huge metropolis and were able to withstand the bombings of some of the roads within their thriving city.
Every brain and network is different.
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