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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They do eventually.
Each dementia case is a bit different, but generally, more recently memories are lost first. Things that are extremely well established in your brain from an early age – the alphabet, how to read and write, your parents names and faces, your own name and birthdate – will be the hardest to erase, and many dementia patients remember those kind of things well into late stage dementia when all is lost.
In the late stage of dementia, my great grandmother could still remember and enjoy Casablanca and It’s A Wonderful Life, movies she’d loved and seen over and over as a young woman, and through her life. This was at a point where she had begun to struggle with talking because she forgot so many words that her sentences had become childlike and muddy, and she’d long forgotten how to dress herself and how to wash. She struggled to recognise her own children (I think them all being in their 50s/60s confused her, because she had no memory of them growing up), but she still recognised Humphrey Bogart.
It’s not really about the type of memory, it’s about how early it was established, and how well it was reinforced. It just happens that things like the alphabet are established extremely early and reinforced *constantly*.
Extremely late stage dementia patients eventually forget even those things, and by that point are essentially in a vegetative state. Most dementia patients die of age-related illness before that point, though.
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