A WORD (OR TWO HUNDRED) FROM THE EDITOR

We had to test saliva for a chemistry experiment at university, but how were we to generate enough to do so? Think of  tamarind, said our professor, and you will salivate. Gross, yes, but it worked! She knew girls well, I’ve thought all these years. Now I think that she also knew how our brains work.

Dr Shuvendu Sen explains the difference between explicit memory and implicit memory in his book Why Buddha Never Had Alzheimer’s (see cover feature). Factual happenings or details such as names, places, dates, telephone numbers and social security numbers, etc., fall under explicit or declarative memory which regresses with age as part of a natural process.

Implicit memory, also called emotional memory, he writes, is reluctant to leave our minds. Thus even those who are unable to recall past events may retain the memory of the experience.

How amazing is it that the brain can retrieve the taste of tamarind?

We pepper our conversations with expressions like “My brain has turned to mush”, “I am going to vegetate today”, “Old Al is acting up. Al who? Al -Zheimer.”

We forget words or names and paper over the gaps with what’s- her-name or whatchamacallit and the conversation continues to flow. But could it be the first signs of Alzheimer’s?

In a podcast my son sent me a link to, Ian Lancashire, a professor of English at UofT, turned text from books into data for a study. One of the authors he studied was Agatha Christie, the most published author ever. Starting with her earliest novels, he covered 50 years of her writing career, measuring word frequency.

The use of language is consistent for the first 72 books. In book number 73, words like thing, anything, something, nothing increase six times and he found that Christie was using 20 per cent fewer different words. Though she was never actually diagnosed with it, the loss of vocabulary may have been a sign of developing Alzheimer’s, he concluded. 

But why is the disease not more in public consciousness?

There was Iris, and Still Alice more recently, on Alzheimer’s, but there are countless movies and books on cancer. In fact, in Still Alice, Julianne Moore’s character actually says she wishes she had cancer, people seem to understand that more.

Jan Ardenn wrote Feeding My Mother and Giller Prize winner Elizabeth Hay’s All Things Consoled is on the same subject. Both are tragic and funny, both are very human and beautiful. But why are we not more aware of the ramifications of the disease?

Because it’s not a fashionable disease, because it affects old people, says Dr Sen bluntly.

Strong words, but so much to think about.

Happy New Year!

SHAGORIKA EASWAR