University College London (my employer) sent me some interview questions for a profile posted as part of Dementia Action Week. If you want to read the interview, which focuses on my dementia-related research and teaching, click here. Click here to learn what UCL is doing to face the global challenge of dementia.
Thanks to my friend Magnus Long for taking the picture during a stroll through Highgate Wood.
Read MoreIn 2016, we made our first contribution to the hunt for language variables which may help identify and track dementia by the way an individual speaks. This week, we replicated our results.
Read MoreThis one took ages to publish. Not only because we kept adding (post-hoc) analyses, but also because I thought the work should appeal to journals to which it ultimately did not.
We looked at language in rare dementias: Primary progressive aphasia, which mostly affects an individual’s ability to use language (we include the three major types, logopenic variant, semantic variant, and non-fluent variant), and behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia, which primarily causes behaviour and mood change. Data were provided by colleagues at UCL’s Dementia Research Centre.
The fascinating thing about dementia is that, ultimately, each kind has been associated with some language symptoms.
Read MoreWhen Ronald Reagan, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2004, ran for president at age 69 and a second time at 73, senility was part of the public debate. The Democratic Party used it in their campaign. After a presidential debate, a senior Democrat told the press: “Reagan showed his age”.
When dementia is mentioned today, the discourse is much more aggressive. The basic mental capacity of both candidates is under scrutiny.
Read MoreDescriptions of Donald Trump's mental capacities range from "stable genius" (his words, as everyone knows by now) to some kind of mad dementia. It takes intelligence to become a successful businessman and to win the presidency as a relative outsider, say some; just listen to what he says, say others: his lack of knowledge about policy and policy making, his way of putting words together that sometimes challenges the label "stream of thought". The great linguist George Lakoff described Trump's way of speaking as very New York, very common folksy, and therefore politically smart; the great linguist Georger Pullum simply called it "Trump's aphasia". After looking at one excerpt of a campaign speech, Pullum ranted that "this nasty, racist, golden-quiffed, self-publicizing nutcase has barely a coherent thought in his head" and suggested that there was no sentence structure to analyze (I think the majority of linguists will disagree with the latter). Since Michael Wolff's claim that every single person who works with Trump doubts his capacity to carry out his job, questions about Trump's mental health finally became front page material.
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