Getting mixed up isn't a brain disease

Caregivers are everywhere, working in silence

Like millions of other Americans, I’ve been watching the debate over the mental acuity of the two most likely candidates for president in November — President Biden and Donald Trump — and like many other people, I have a personal interest in memory loss and cognitive function, because I’m the caregiver for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease.

It seems to me that neither man talks like someone who is cognitively impaired. I remember watching a clip of President Reagan being questioned near the end of his second term by an investigator in the Iran-Contra probe and thinking he looked lost in a way that was alarming. But I have never felt that way watching Biden or Trump.

President Biden sounds a bit frail. He speaks softly and he sometimes rushes his sentences, mushing words together in a way that is hard to understand. Occasionally, he says the wrong name — inserting one country’s president in place of another, for example. This is a common sort of speaking error that I hear all the time, including from middle-aged and young people. I do it myself. 

Listen closely to news broadcasters and news panel discussions, and you’ll hear malapropisms and other mistakes. Last week, for example, I heard Steve Sadow, the lawyer handling the Fani Willis hearing for Donald Trump, reference Willis’ “cash hoard.”

Willis looked startled, and Sadow said no, not that word, I would never say that, and spelled out the one he meant: “H-O-R-D-E,” he said.

Steve Sadow is not cognitively impaired, just human.

All of us make mistakes when we speak, especially by using the wrong name or word but from the same category.

If we see a beautiful young woman with brown eyes whom we recognize as our daughter, for example, we might call her by the name of our other beautiful, brown-eyed daughter, not because we can’t tell them apart but because our brain reaches their names through the same path.

Likewise, when Biden said Mexico instead of Egypt for the country where El-Sisi is president, and Trump said Nikki Haley instead of Nancy Pelosi for the female antagonist in his story about Jan. 6, it wasn’t a sign their brains are failing but evidence of the imprecision of our information-retrieval process. 

It’s legitimate to assess the vigor of a presidential candidate, but it’s wrong, especially for unqualified reporters, to speculate about medical conditions. 

People often say the opposite of what they mean. I’ve heard TV news personalities do this, perhaps because they talk fast, under pressure, while also trying to speak grammatically. They can’t just let the words flow out, confident their listeners will correct any errors and fill in any blanks. They get their brains involved, and their thoughts get in the way of their mouths.

 Biden has a more formal style than Trump when he’s addressing the public. He tends to use complete and complex sentences, and he sometimes gets tangled up in them. Trump is more casual, throwing out short phrases, like “beautiful business” or “very unfair, very wrong,” and he repeats them, sometimes five or six times in the span of a minute or two. I don’t like the way Trump talks, and what he says is usually reprehensible, but it’s a style, not a disease.

The stark differences between the two candidates in policy, temperament and character are plenty upon which to base our decision this November without speculating about diseases we are unqualified to diagnose.

Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases are profoundly disabling for those who have them and difficult for their caregivers and loved ones. Seizing on common speaking errors and memory lapses by politicians as proof of such an affliction minimizes their seriousness.

Alzheimer’s disease is not about making a gaffe now and then or failing to recall a name or a date. I wish it were.

Support

Speaking of Alzheimer’s, I want to say thank you to the many readers who express support for me and Bella and our family in their comments. Writing on the subject, which I have been doing almost since Bella was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in February of 2017, has helped me to deal with the changes as they’ve occurred, and the encouragement from readers has kept my spirits up.

It has been an eye-opening seven years. More than six million Americans have Alzheimer’s, and it’s amazing how little I knew or had heard about the disease before Bella’s diagnosis. All those caregivers out there are performing a task that takes over every aspect of your life and, eventually, almost every minute of your day. But they don’t say much about it. Or, perhaps, they say more than I knew, but I wasn’t listening, thinking there was no need. 

Subscriptions

And speaking of support, thanks again for subscribing. As part of our new initiative to seek paid as well as free subscribers, I will sometimes be writing a second column, running on Thursdays. This is one.