

The Disremembered - benbreen
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/where-does-identity-go-once-memory-falters-in-dementia/

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ca98am79
My grandfather forgot who I was and couldn't recognize me shortly before he
died. We were very close and this still haunts me. Not the fact that he
forgot, but how he acted towards me during that time. Since then, I have
really questioned my own identity, I guess because I identified at least
partly based on my relationship with him (and my family), and this made me
question all of that.

~~~
sukilot
Imagine if you lived in the 19th Century and you communicated by letter, and
your grandfather suffered a severe injury and couldn't and read or write you
letters anymore, and instead they were dictated via scribe who wasn't a fluent
speaker of the language. That's what a degenerative brain disease is like.

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zyxley
Identity-as-memory isn't something I buy into much, because my own memory is
flatly terrible already. My childhood up until 10 or so is mostly a blank, for
example, with just some impressionist highlights of place names and locations
popping up if I think real hard.

~~~
ggreer
There is more than one kind of memory. You're talking about episodic memory. I
think you have many memories from childhood that you aren't considering. I'm
sure you still have many semantic memories (facts, concepts, etc) from before
age 10. For example: if you're from the US, you still know the name of the
first president of the United States.

You probably have even more information from childhood stored in implicit
memory. If you're like most people, you learned how to ride a bike, tie your
shoes, understand language, and play catch. The memories of learning these
things are separate from the memories needed to actually do them.

Erasing _all_ of a person's memories would truly destroy them. Once they
formed new memories, they would be as different from their original self as an
identical twin separated at birth.

~~~
gliese1337
In fairness, studies of adult twins separated at birth do tend to indicate
that they tend to turn out surprisingly not that different from each other....

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aurora72
Dementia is caused by eating bread as staple food. David Perlmutter, MD shows
in his book Grain Brain how gluten gradually wreaks havoc on brain cells.
Because people born in between 1920 and 1970 didn't know this fact, many of
them caught that horrible disease.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

~~~
aurora72
I'm 43 and for the last and a half year I started to have difficulty in
learning new subjects. And one day in last February after I finished lunch
which included 2 slices of bread, I decided to solve that problem and began an
intensive search on Internet. I read dozens of articles talkin about the
bread's bad effects on brain and finally came across Perlmutter's videos on
youtube. He was telling not to eat any bread even on breakfast! So the day
after I ate no bread even on breakfast and guess what, starting from that day
I started to learn new subjects again.

I know, not eating any bread leaves a feeling of hunger, it's almost as if I
haven't eaten any food. But thats only because I've been eating bread all my
life every single day and so the body got very accustomed to it. But after 3
months I also realized that body doesn't need it to feel full.

Friends in my vicinity get also disturbed by my saying bread is harmful to the
body. But I am myself the evidence that bread is no good for the body.

~~~
kazinator
Your personal anecdotal story does not constitute "extraordinary evidence".
Your observations are not even gathered in such a way that they could
constitute a piece of evidence at all.

~~~
kazinator
For instance, regarding "learning subjects". You believe that some change in
eating habits has improved your ability to learn. Does your belief have a
rational basis?

Subjects (let us call them "topics", to distinguish from "test subjects":
people being experimented upon) are not some amorphous substance that you
"pour" into your mind; they are all different. You also cannot erase a topic
from your mind so you can fairly re-test the pouring after making some change,
like diet or whatever.

If you have difficulty with a topic X today, you can find the same topic X
easier after some passage of time simply because you were exposed to X, and
let it "settle in your brain" for a while.

There is no way to to have a valid, objective test using the same person and
the same topic, where we can determine that the same topic X became easier to
learn due to some external factor, like not eating bread. The test is
confounded by the subject's prior experience with tackling X: the "after"
situation is different from "before" because of prior experience.

There is no way we can test different topics X and Y, either. If you have
difficulty with learning topic X, and then some external factor changes (like
not eating bread), and you have an easier time with topic Y, that doesn't
conclusively show anything. The test is confounded by both similarities
between X and Y (applicability of the prior experience with tackling X to
tackling topic Y) and by their differences (difficulty in Y is unrelated to
difficulty in X).

If you want to study this properly, you need large, random samples of people.
You need control groups as well as test subjects. One group doesn't consume
bread (or anything with glutent) and another does. Both learn similar topic in
a similar setting. Does the test group show different progress from the
control group? Different in a significant way? Even studies done at this level
still have confounding problems that give us reason to be skeptical of their
claimed results: such as improper sampling methods, lack of proper control
over information leakage in experiments, poor accountability for the round-
the-clock behavior of human subjects, and abuse of statistical methods to draw
unwarranted conclusions.

Then there is the poor amount of data you have gathered (if we can call it
data). How many _times_ have you quit eating bread and observed the difference
on learning or other cognitive tasks? Sounds like you've only done this once.
You've done this once, and, what is more, you're _biased_ : prior to the
experiment you already believed the "gluten-brain" hypothesis already from
your Internet readings, and were looking to _confirm_ it. In honest research,
even if we personally believe in a hypothesis, we must work on focus on
eliminating the serious objections which tend _refute_ the hypothesis, and not
simply look for a few shreds of observations which suggest that it might be
true. If we cannot eliminate the objections, we have to face the fact that the
hypothesis may not be true after all.

