Shadowing Practice: Fear of Forgetting - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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At best, forgetting is simply inconvenient.
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At its worst, it can destroy a life.
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Multiple lives.
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There are many truly awful ways you can die, but significantly few fates worse than dying.
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Not to mention that the chances of ever experiencing any of them are astronomically slim.
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Except dementia.
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I think dementia is one of those few, and it's one of my greatest fears.
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While other fears, say, a fear of deep water, cause what is a comparatively innocent distrust, forgetting is unavoidable.
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Dementia is uncontrollable.
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We have no way to slow its advancing emptiness.
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Dementia takes everything from you before, finally, you lose yourself, and while there are suggested ways to outrun it, it's hard to be sure that you've ever truly escaped.
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Even then, you may still forget large fragments of your life, submit to false memories, or lose important information forever.
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We are all running out of time.
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Dementia refers to any sort of memory loss related confusion.
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It can be caused by a very long list of different diseases.
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Some of them revolve around simple deficits, such as a vitamin B12 deficiency, but others are a bit more complicated.
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The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer's disease.
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It's currently ranked as the sixth leading cause of death for adults.
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The disease is caused by abnormalities with two different kinds of protein in the brain.
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One of them is linked to chromosome 21, which might be why 70% of people with Down syndrome develop Alzheimer's after the age of 40.
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Down syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21.
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This chromosome contains the instructions for the production of a protein called amyloid precursor protein.
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But it's what this protein breaks down into that's concerning, amyloid beta.
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Amyloid beta protein can stick to other amyloid beta proteins, gradually building up into a a hard, insoluble plaque between cells.
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Healthy brains usually clear out amyloid buildup, but those with Alzheimer's don't seem to be able to.
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Thus, these plaques never stop accumulating.
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The other toxic brain abnormality in Alzheimer's has to do with tau proteins.
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Tau is responsible for preserving the structure of the part of neurons that deliver nutrients to other cells in the brain.
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In Alzheimer's, these tau proteins become chemically sticky and tangle up together, compromising the delivery network and starving your brain cells to death in the process.
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There are seven stages to the disease, the first being the only stage in which everything functions normally,
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but past that, it's only a matter of sinking deeper and deeper into the horror.
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We used to be entirely unable to offer a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease before somebody with it died.
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An autopsy would be performed to reveal what Alzheimer's always leaves behind, an aggressively shrunken brain, and it would be declared that this is what the patient died from.
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Of course, this was not very consoling.
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With brain tech capable of amyloid imaging, we now deal with a new dilemma.
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Now we can tell very far in advance whether or not someone has Alzheimer's, but there's still no cure.
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It's at this point that some people and their caretaker-to-be are prescribed antidepressants instead.
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And what's left but a brain subjected to itself?
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a long unraveling, an insidious disease advancing your synapses' self-destruction.
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Phenomenology is the philosophy of lived experience, of phenomena.
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It studies the way consciousness functions as an interpreter of the world.
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Two ideas from this field in particular can help us understand what it's like to have dementia.
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For a long time, phenomenologists have been using metaphors to help us understand their arguments.
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Martin Heidegger saw consciousness as a forced clearing into which things are allowed into the light.
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Applied to dementia, this metaphor proves especially eerie.
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The clearing slowly invaded by the encroaching woods until no light shines.
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There's an ancient Greek word that's repeated a lot throughout his writings, aletheia, meaning truth.
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Literally, the word means that which is unconcealed, discovered, or even unforgotten.
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He proposes that truth is, in fact, that which does not escape notice.
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This way of thinking about truth was very important to Heidegger.
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He believes that everything possesses its own aletheia, that every phenomenon is capable of revealing itself to us as itself, not disguised as some other thing.
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We are merely the witnesses to this fundamental process.
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Consciousness only sets the stage, allows the entities of the world to reveal themselves to us.
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But Heidegger didn't just see truth as a revealing process.
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He also understood that it involves an element of concealment.
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What is hidden is only hidden in relation to what has been revealed.
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Any phenomenon can be understood in a myriad of different ways, but every way we choose to approach something,
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every revelation, conceals, if but for a moment, all other interpretations.
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New discoveries replace what was previously understood.
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Any sense of deja vu or nostalgia seems to come all of its own, but when we can trace back our memories through time,
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we cannot deny that it feels as if something hidden in the source of those feelings has now been revealed to us.
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Through this process of unconcealment, the world as an inert force comes alive, gains fuller meaning.
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It breathes deep according to the inhale and exhale of your memories.
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Alzheimer's disease begins as it ends, as a negative gap, a growing void that conceals itself.
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The second stage of Alzheimer's is when the symptoms of the disease begin to develop.
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Very mild forgetfulness, a difficulty with words every now and then.
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You'd never guess it was Alzheimer's.
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The idea doesn't ever cross your mind.
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Why should you think that there's anything wrong?
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We've all got to get old sometime.
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Isn't that going to have some effect on us?
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isn't a natural part of aging.
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It's only by looking back that you can see that the signs were there all along.
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It's the first weed growing in the clearing.
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In the Phenomenology of Perception, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty pays special focus to the perceptual networks of the body,
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confronting a strange lack in the previous conversations had by these kinds of philosophers.
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Our consciousness isn't some detached, distant beholder of the world, he exclaims.
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It's bound to a body, subject to physical influences.
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Taking this into account, Merleau-Ponty later called embodied consciousness a chiasm.
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Chiasms are X-shaped structures, nerves or tendons crossing over each other at a junction.
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This nomenclature is meant to illustrate the way your body, as the instrument of sensation, can itself be sensed.
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How with one hand you can feel your other.
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It's a folding in on itself, and in between.
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Merleau-Ponty tells us that the world holds within itself a depth of experience, a depth from which the significance of things arises.
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As the intertwining of past and present, imaginary and immediate, body and world, our existence as Chiasm is that depth.
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Depth is the dimension of dimensions, a container for the locales of space and time.
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It is also a dimension in which things or elements of things envelop each other.
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This tension between them as they compete for our attention is precisely what constitutes this depth.
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It is surprisingly difficult to keep something buried.
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In his fascinating book Underland, Robert McFarland describes how ancient structures have begun to emerge from the depths and folds of the earth.
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Glaciers yield up their frozen bodies, and dying rivers expose old monuments out from beneath their waters.
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Even when we want to bury something deep into the obscurity of oblivion, desperately try to forget something.
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It painfully protrudes back into our memory.
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The depths cough up all that is buried.
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Merleau-Ponty's example of depth is of a red dress.
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Its red fabric leaps out.
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Its color is obvious.
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But at the same time, it is sieged by a remembering of the past.
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It is a punctuation in the field of red things.
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A field which includes graduation robes, southern Utah desert, the paprika and the deviled eggs from that one cafe, and.. and...
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Our memories exist out there in the world.
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The tension between the significances of past occurrences and those of the present is lodged within things.
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As such we do not only look inward to see our past, but outward into the world.
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This is the chiasm of our existence.
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To touch is to be touched.
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The word is so scary.
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It's a bad word.
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Alzheimer's disease usually starts in your hippocampus, one of the regions of the brain associated with long-term memory, and your frontal lobe, the seat of higher decision-making.
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It doesn't have to, though.
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It could form anywhere in the brain, causing some pretty eerie symptoms.
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The disease begins to spread.
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It isn't going to stop, either.
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It begins to take more than just a moment to work things out in your head, to process what people are saying to you.
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Then there are the questions.
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Where are we?
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What are we doing?
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But you've already asked that three times already.
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It's okay.
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You don't remember doing that.
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These delays are eerie, uncomfortable.
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Your family casually throw around your mishaps behind your back.
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Do you think there's something happening to her?
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I don't know, but the other day she… You can hear them through the walls while you try to take a nap.
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The human tragedy is that your existence is wholly confined to the tissue inside of your skull, a lump of electric fat, the consistency of tofu.
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Now, the same mind that previously expanded outward into infinity can no longer breach those pale domed walls of bone.
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The skull is an incredibly claustrophobic space, and you can feel it suffocating you as the brain fog sets in.
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You can feel your finite being, your weakness, but you refuse to believe it.
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There may be a reason why at the bottom of Pandora's box, greater than disaster and violence and sin, the greatest evil of all lay hope.
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Aside from forgetfulness, one of the early symptoms most people think of
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when they think about Alzheimer's is the negative effect it has on language.
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Patients struggle to find the right words for things they used to be able to name effortlessly.
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Those that speak more than one language often revert solely to their mother tongue.
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It's part of their gradual failure to identify the things and people around them.
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Merleau-Pontyan scholar Glenn Mazis explains that depth, the fight between the past and present world for what something will signify, is not constituted of, say,
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separate reds, one for the dress, one for the graduation gown,
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the desert rock, etc, etc. So he says that the red perceived is precisely this play of significances.
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Depth explains how the mind shuffles meaning, but also describes how that meaning is stored.
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The world absorbs the significances of our memories and experiences.
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Every individual instance of a door is one of many doors and has the power to remind us of the others.
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In this way, every object is a symbol with reference to itself as much
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as it is a symbol for the totality of its existence as a concept.
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Both of these symbols are actually two sides of the same coin though.
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A name.
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There are two different theories on how names work.
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One of them, descriptivism, states that names operate according to a description of the object.
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So if I call something a tiger, I mean something that is a large four-legged cat with orange and black stripes.
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Saul Kripke, in his book Naming a Necessity, disagrees with this theory.
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He points out that if we were to take a lion
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and cosmetically alter it so that it fit every description of a tiger, it wouldn't suddenly be accurate to refer to it as a tiger.
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The main concern behind Kripke's theory, anti-descriptivism, is finding what makes an object the same object even if all of its descriptive features have changed.
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The answer, he provides, is that the name takes precedence.
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Naming something is what identifies it, not describing it.
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The philosopher Shlavoj Zizek has explored some of the interesting implications behind this idea.
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For one thing, he points out that what anti-descriptivism shows us, though it doesn't know it, is that it is actually the name itself which creates an identity.
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Objects need a name to recognize themselves, and that's especially true of people.
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If a name is what tethers an object to its identity throughout its many changes, then there must be something in the name which represents that object better than the object itself possibly could.
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A self-referential symbol.
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Because names radically represent objects this way, they also capture that unattainable something which is in that object more than any given version of it.
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A redness more red than any particular red.
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This is how language establishes its connection to depth.
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also enact a play of significances.
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The word red could refer to any shade of red, anything that is red, all of it grasping at that unattainable redness.
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A name unites this given field, ties it together into a knot of meaning.
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Freud displayed this ability of language with his practice of free association.
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It was common for him to ask his patients to respond to a prompt with the first word that came to mind.
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Doing so would assist in therapy by revealing the patient's experiences, their memories.
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And where there is memory, there is depth.
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But how to explain the dreaded moment in which a loved one with dementia fails to recognize you?
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Anti-descriptivism also shows us that without a proper signifier, a name, our understanding of the object itself is lost.
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Without a name, loved ones become endigmas.
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We can't tell who they are.
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What we're left with are only descriptions, a list of attributes sourced from a fading memory.
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Kripke does not tell us that descriptions cease to be descriptions, only that they are not enough to identify an object the way a name is.
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Is this inadequacy of description not displayed best of all when someone with dementia calls you someone else's name?
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Maybe it was the name of one of your parents, or a relative.
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You likely satisfied some part of their description, but that is not who you are.
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The clearing is overgrown with thickets and thorns.
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The true nature of things now conceals itself.
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Escapes notice.
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All of this is to say that, philosophically considered, dementia is the total loss of life's symbolic richness, and the world can only be understood symbolically.
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In fiction and art too, forgetting is linked to this feeling of the symbolic rotting away into tomorrow.
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You can't discuss dementia like this without mentioning The Caretaker, specifically his work Everywhere at the End of Time,
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a six-hour collection of albums which together thrust you headfirst into the deteriorating mind of an Alzheimer's patient.
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Over those six and a half hours, you'll hear old music slow down, reverse, crackle, distort, echo, and die.
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The albums each correspond to one of the stages of Alzheimer's, and could be summarized by one word,
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daydream, nightmare, reality, rupture, power, and...
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They were originally released over six months intervals to give a sense of time passing, but it's recommended that it's listened to all in one sitting.
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If you haven't ever listened to Everywhere at the end of time and are considering it, you should probably consider your mental health beforehand.
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On the first listen, the collection feels evil, ominous, or demonic if you're in a particularly sensitive mood.
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Different sections can evoke dangerously powerful emotions.
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It is, simply put, devastatingly effective at what it tries to achieve.
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All that unpleasantness is the point, of course.
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Leland Kirby, the artist behind the character of The Caretaker, stops at nothing to make you understand.
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Every stage is accompanied by detailed descriptions and track names, both of which are essential to understanding the emotions that accompany the disease.
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For example, the tracks Glimpses of Hope in Trying Times, Denial Unraveling, and Surrendering to Despair tell their own story beyond just the music.
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The genius of Everywhere at the End of Time is how the music it samples, and the memories those samples represent, are used.
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Certain tunes slowly dissipate into unrecognizable silhouettes.
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And after a certain point, even when we cannot describe the music playing amidst the confusion, Some people have still been able to name the samples flipping in and out.
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But knowing they're there does not mean that we can recognize them.
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That they aren't lost amidst the pandemonium.
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Out of the many effects Kirby uses to depict the distortion of memory, the most common one is a kind of vinyl static.
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It echoes explosively in your skull.
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But static has a dual meaning.
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It refers to this hissing we associate with the grime lodged
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into the grooves of aged vinyl records just as much as it does a complete absence of movement.
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I've always thought the combination of these two definitions was rather unsettling.
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It reminds me of the decay of Heidegger's clearing, of the drying up of Merleau-Ponty's depth, the hardening of active neurons in the plaque.
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The end of the project is genuinely incomprehensible.
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Even though it was all made from pre-existing records, I can't even tell what instruments they're playing at the end here.
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And then, we're met with a horrible silence.
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The album covers for Everywhere at the End of Time were done by Ivan Seale, a long-time friend of Kirby's.
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It isn't the first time they've worked together.
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He also collaborated with Kirby to create the album covers for An Empty Bliss Beyond This World and Take Care, It's a Desert Out There, amongst others.
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Seale's paintings are hard to process.
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It's never obvious exactly what these paintings are actually of.
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The longer you look at them, the more confusing they get.
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And just when you think you might have figured it out, there's always that lingering doubt.
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It's an uncanny rendition of Rorschach's inkblot test.
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Steele had a collection showcased in 2011 titled The Object Hurts the Space, in which many of these confusing characters of real objects,
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placed against their usual pale backdrops, were displayed.
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Some have wondered if Steele didn't construct sculptures for his paintings as a model during of creation, but fittingly enough, he says he paints his imagined objects from memory,
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with its unavoidable errors.
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Siegel himself has also created some experimental recordings, playing the tracks during his showings.
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He uses a computer program to build nonsensical sentences out of a given set of words.
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Many of the tracks share the theme of free association, an activity reflected in the paintings themselves.
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but his artwork grows ever more disturbing when paired with Kirby's music.
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The way these covers precariously grow more violent, abstract, and unidentifiable in relation to Alzheimer's isn't just a metaphor.
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Take a look at this.
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Back before there was amyloid imaging, doctors relied on tests such as these to judge whether or not a patient could be diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
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I'm particularly fascinated by this one, called the clock test, in which patients were asked to draw the numbers on a clock.
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What fascinates me is the way you can plainly see the cognitive decline, just like in Sio's artwork for the album.
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The covers to Everywhere at the End of Time remind me, as they do others, of the last self-portraits of artist William Utermolen before he died from Alzheimer's.
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They document six years out of his eleven-year decline.
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The series ended when he could barely commit his pencil to paper.
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But his raw portrayal of Alzheimer's didn't begin with these self-portraits.
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The early signs of his dementia can perhaps be read in an earlier collection of art he called the conversation pieces.
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They were a mostly biographical set of artworks, celebrating the life he shared with his wife and the warm companionship of his friends.
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I get an odd feeling when I look at these paintings, though.
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A subtle sense that there's something wrong.
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I feel it in the artist's shifting perceptions of space, objects, and people.
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All of which may be hints towards the disease that would later take his life.
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And then he got the news.
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His last large painting, Blue Skies, depicts William's reaction to his diagnosis.
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A devastated figure holding onto a table as onto a raft in the blue bleakness of an empty studio.
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During the meeting with his doctor, William was encouraged to continue painting.
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He agreed to, and had his work submitted to a nurse to be photographed.
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Thus the portraits documenting his decline came about.
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His last portrait was scribbled on the napkin in the year 2002.
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died in 2007.
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Sometimes friends, and even family, will abandon someone with dementia.
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When former US President Ronald Reagan was diagnosed, his ambassador to the UK and very close friend Walter Annenberg thereafter refused to see him.
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It disturbed him to see Reagan so out of it.
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Doing so meant denying the entire family his support in the process.
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For many years it was believed that people with dementia suffered from insanity.
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Alois Alzheimer first discovered the plaque and tangles related to Alzheimer's disease in 1906, but it wasn't until the late 70s that knowledge of the disease found its way into hospitals.
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World War I, the rise of fascism in Germany, and World War II halted research and cast a lot of doubt onto the work of German scientists.
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Alzheimer's research was left unread for decades.
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of the research today has been trying to make up for that lost time.
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Meanwhile, the number of patients grows.
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In his lightning book, The Problem of Alzheimer's, Dr. Jason Karlowish discusses the critical flaws in her history of treating those with the disease.
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Medical institutions have prioritized funding potential cures over present treatment, even denying Medicare coverage for the costly expense of receiving a diagnosis.
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However, our failed attempts at a drug for Alzheimer's have time and time again been reliably covered by insurance companies.
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He explains, The problem then, and still today in America, is that an effective intervention is not a treatment unless it has a business model.
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Programs and interventions meant to support caretakers are largely without a system to promote or sustain them.
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Harlowish claims it's this disparity between the financially robust drug industry
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and the uncoordinated efforts of caretaker programs that's at the heart of the modern Alzheimer's crisis.
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Caretakers are largely on their own to shoulder the task of caring for the Alzheimer's patients and their families.
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It's a daunting task, a 24-7 job with an insane financial cost.
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Some caretakers are left with a choice, retire and watch over their loved one full-time, or take on another job to avoid going broke in the process.
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I'm seeing this for the first time and yet this is not the first time.
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The moderate stages of Alzheimer's mark a point of no return.
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On the outside, we watch the person we love struggle to do simple tasks.
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It takes them an exhausting amount of effort.
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Nothing feels right.
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Everything is slightly off.
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Laid into the disease, it's even a battle for them to speak in complete sentences.
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It's depressing.
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It's awful.
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It's… embarrassing for them.
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A total personality change is common in these stages.
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I read story after story of sweet husbands and wives growing uncharacteristically brutal and violent, even beating their families.
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There's just this unexplainable rage boiling up inside of them.
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In very extreme cases they'll get caught in the grip of psychosis, experience wave after wave of hallucinations.
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But sometimes it isn't all so dramatic.
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Sometimes it's as understated as stubborn characters growing milder like little children.
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It isn't uncommon for patients to frequently make sexual, racist, or otherwise derogatory remarks either.
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Some people with Alzheimer's lose their ability to filter what is and isn't appropriate to say.
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Many of these curses and slurs might be some of the only words they still remember, deeply encoded into one of the last remaining sections of their brain.
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But you are still self-aware in these stages, feel despair and embarrassment and shame and question why you're doing what you're doing.
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You don't know.
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One guide explains it.
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You start thinking strange thoughts that don't make sense, but you can't stop them from flooding your consciousness.
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The static screams now.
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The static giving birth to static, giving birth to static, giving birth to the...
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For most of us, forgetting something is nothing more than a trivial annoyance.
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That's not to say it doesn't still affect us.
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At times I won't remember why I've entered a room after I walk into it.
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It's something that happens a lot with my ADHD.
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It's like I found myself running on autopilot and suddenly become aware that I have no idea what I'm actually doing.
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It reminds me of the second episode of the sixth season of Doctor Who, Day of the Moon.
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As a kid, the episode introduced me to the Silence, who I still think is the most fascinating creature from the show.
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Stephen Moffat, the author of many of the show's most famous aliens, often relies not so much on a terrifying appearance as much as he does a terrifying premise.
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The same is true for the Silence.
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Are you ready to hear that premise?
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They're an alien that you can only remember for as long as you perceive them.
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The moment you look away, any idea of their existence is thoroughly washed from your memory.
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But this creepy effect really is pulled off best in this scene from Day of the Moon.
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In it we watch a woman, Amy Pond, struggle to escape from an orphanage.
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Walking up the stairs, there's writing on the wall that's said to keep appearing on its own.
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We watch Amy enter a room, hear the door close.
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It's locked.
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And as she grips the door handle, a recorder embedded into her hand relates to her a message in her own voice.
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She runs through the window, tries to push it open.
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Tallies begin to run up her arms, light up her face.
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The entire scene takes up less than 4 minutes.
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But how much time does each of those tallies represent?
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Really, how many attempts to leave that Amy can no longer remember and thus aren't shown to us as the audience?
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All it took was one glance to ruin every single one of them.
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Some days with ADHD, I swear I spend more time wandering around wondering what I'm
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supposed to be doing than I do doing the thing I was supposed to be doing.
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I feel disoriented, distracted, and just like that orphanage scene, I can't help but think about all that lost time trying to do the one task.
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There is, it almost goes without saying, a link between our memory and the way we orient ourselves.
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Although my ADHD-related forgetfulness can be inconvenient, eventually I do remember what it is that I was supposed to be doing.
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Some days, it only takes seconds, because I know something is wrong.
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I can feel it.
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And working back from that feeling, I can reorient myself.
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Exit the room, re-enter it.
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Sure, it's inconvenient, but lost time is really the worst of it.
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Dementia, on the other hand, is perhaps more akin to the silence itself.
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In the end, there is no sense of disorientation attached to the forgetting of one's objective,
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and so a new, and sometimes delusional, objective is spontaneously invented.
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The existence of the old one was entirely erased the moment you looked away.
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A negative gap, a void, that conceals itself.
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In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, we're told the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has become unstuck in time.
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He enters a door in 1995 and finds himself in 1941, walks back through it into 63.
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He feels an endless sense of stage fright, we're told, because he never knows what part of his life he'll have to act in next.
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Vonnegut wrote the novel in order to describe his time as a POW during the bombing of Dresden in World War II.
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As he himself says, all of this happened, more or less.
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And we do spend time with Billy during the war.
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A lot of time, actually.
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Jumping between birth and death and everywhere in between.
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But there is one scene that I thought a lot about while reading.
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It feels strangely...normal.
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Billy sits in the basement writing letters to newspapers about his time as a zoo animal on an alien planet.
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The heater isn't working, but he hasn't noticed.
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He's been dozing off, traveling through time every time he falls asleep.
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That's it.
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Billy writing, falling asleep, Billy writing.
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It inspired a sad kind of hope in me as the reader.
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I hoped that this hellish eternity of walking through doors into the armpits of time was just one big delusion.
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I yearned for a reasonable explanation.
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I wanted this to be it, the indisputable reality, as if all the rest of it playing out in his head would make it any less painful.
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The novel knew, and they liked to toying with me.
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The structure of Slaughterhouse-Five does somewhat mimic the delusions of those with middle stage Alzheimer's though.
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People with Alzheimer's sometimes live in the past, are misplaced in time.
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They'll suddenly grow adamant that their grandpa is coming over, call out for a dead childhood pet.
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Sometimes they'll just wander off, break out, and walk to work the way they used to.
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But through this lens, the book grows even more discomforting.
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Merleau-Ponty tells us that as an embodied being, the depth of your immediate experience doesn't call forth your memories as pure abstractions.
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Rather, your memories reflect the bodily experience of your past.
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To use this example of a red dress again, when that dress reminds me of something, say, the graduation robe, I see myself wearing that graduation robe,
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and I feel the way my body moves hiking through the red terrain of Utah.
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This is the way your memories are formed, so they're remembered the same way.
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To relive your past would be to act out this role.
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In an essay from his memoir, Everything in its Place, Oliver Sacks recites his experience with a particular Alzheimer's patient who used to be a medical director for a hospital.
366
In fact, it was the hospital he was later admitted to.
367
Though he was severely disoriented and agitated for most of that time, there would be moments in which he believed he was once again a medical director for the hospital.
368
Touring the halls, he'd speak to other patients and flip through the charts unless someone stopped him.
369
One time, he spied his own chart, said, Charles M, that's me, flipped it open, read Alzheimer's disease and cried out, God help me, as he began to sob.
370
After that, he could sometimes be heard saying, I want to die, let me die.
371
Sacks likened these moments in which Dr. M believed he was once again a doctor to stepping into a role.
372
Touring the halls, reading charts, and assisting patients were all a part of his habitual body, a role summarized by the experiences of his past.
373
Stepping into this role oriented him forward as freshly as
374
if he were still a doctor because in a certain sense his body remembered as much as his mind did.
375
If you remember Heidegger's metaphor of the clearing, his concept of aletheia, unconcealment, is that all phenomena have the capacity to reveal their true nature to us.
376
As the mind begins to erode, more and more of what reveals itself to us is hidden away.
377
Short term memory fails to function, and so the information of the present world is lost through the shadows of one's ancient forests.
378
Delusions function against the background of our faith in the world.
379
We all place so much trust in Alethea, of a world which autonomously reveals itself, that the delusional never consider that the truth has been concealed from them.
380
Sacks asks the question, alongside many other caregivers, should we therefore tell patients that they are no longer what they used to be?
381
Should we take away their accustomed and well-rehearsed identity and replace it with a reality that, though real to us, is meaningless to them?
382
He answers his own question.
383
To do so would be beyond cruel.
384
For patients with dementia, all of the potential significances of something are confined to the depths of their imagination instead of the present world.
385
The immediate presence of things means nothing.
386
It holds no new significance.
387
We now traverse wholly into the realm of the imaginary.
388
Alzheimer's disfigures your memories beyond recognition before it ever lets you forget them.
389
In the 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell, a special ops cyborg tracks a mysterious brain hacker with the hopes that it will help her understand her own humanity.
390
The film presents us with a future in which the human body is a mostly outdated piece of technology.
391
Prosthetic manufacturing has advanced to the point where most people have been transplanted into completely new forms, retaining just enough of a margin to call themselves human.
392
Despite the syntheticness of it all, there is still deep down in everyone the thing that you could call the soul.
393
Something that cannot be replicated.
394
Something wholly organic.
395
An elusive, nebulous force called a ghost.
396
Although a ghost can't be replicated, it can still be manipulated.
397
Ever since I first saw this film, there's this scene with a garbage collector that's haunted me.
398
I've even had dreams about it.
399
In the midst of the cops pursuit of the brain hacking puppet master, we're shown a conversation between two garbage men.
400
One of them tells his co-worker that his estranged wife won't let him see his daughter, so he's hacking into her brain to understand why.
401
He even moves to show his co-worker a photo of his daughter.
402
The garbage man, however, has been ghost hacked.
403
Neither his wife nor his daughter are real.
404
The woman whose brain he was hacking into is actually a government official.
405
We're shown the photograph of his daughter again as all of this is being explained to him.
406
Look, this is the photo you showed to your co-worker.
407
Who do you see?
408
I had a picture of her.
409
She was there.
410
She was smiling like an angel.
411
What's her name?
412
How old is she?
413
Where did you meet your wife and when did you marry her?
414
I'm sorry to put you through this, pal.
415
Come on, who do you see?
416
The puppet master works like a parasite, a cybernetic virus, wildly mutating the mind of its host, then sending itself out to breed inside the skulls of others.
417
This man's memories aren't the only thing that's been manipulated.
418
No, the film is insistent.
419
He's been ghost hacked.
420
His very soul has been meddled with, and as such, his identity too.
421
He used to be a husband and a father.
422
Now he understands himself to be neither of those things.
423
Those memories, that emotion, none of it matters now.
424
Despite his pleas, the cops can't tell him who he is.
425
René Descartes' maxim, I think therefore I am, is a large part of the philosophical identity of Ghost in the Shell.
426
It expresses a radical doubt in the existence of everything that happens to us.
427
You can doubt all of this, Descartes says, but you can't doubt the thing doing the doubting.
428
Even if you do doubt your own existence, there is still something doing the doubting.
429
Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of chiasm explores a part of this idea that often goes unexplored.
430
If we can only be certain of our own existence, how can we possibly define ourselves?
431
Because there is a world.
432
We exist in it.
433
And whether or not we believe it's real, it is subject to our perception.
434
Our experiences living in this world construct who we are.
435
Exposing the world as a delusion means to lose oneself in the process.
436
If nothing is real, then how can I be who I am?
437
Who am I really, if anyone at all?
438
Goodbye Worlds Before Your Eyes.
439
A recently deceased soul, fished up out of the inky black sea of Limbo, recounts their life in preparation to be judged.
440
It is also a game in which time jumps forward when you blink.
441
Your eyes are the controller.
442
And now I'm about to spoil the entire game.
443
In an interview, one of the game's developers explained that most games are about empowering you, and this is about taking power away.
444
And And it is sort of about humbling yourself to the fact that you're going to have to blink eventually.
445
But the blinking mechanic isn't the only interesting thing about before your eyes.
446
There are, of course, the key moments in which the game requires you to make a choice or to do something.
447
While these vary in importance from minor choices to pivotal forks, they all contribute to your final sense of self.
448
Yet right at the climax of a life woven together from misery and triumph, There's this moment in which it's revealed that you aren't exactly who you think you are.
449
This was beyond shocking to me.
450
I mean, I guess I should have seen it coming, but I didn't.
451
I almost couldn't believe it.
452
I was so invested in what was happening that I never stopped to think that maybe...
453
Some of the shock of this twist had to do with memories that I skipped by.
454
They seemed boring to me when I was first thrust into them, so I blinked. But it didn't matter.
455
The memories I did see, the ones that really led me toward this radically different sense of self, those could not have been further from the truth of who I was.
456
It led me to doubt even some of the earliest memories.
457
Did those really happen?
458
Or were they just necessary for the greater lie?
459
In Ghost in the Shell, it's implied that the new memories of the garbage collector came at the cost of his old ones.
460
This isn't so far off.
461
Forgetting a memory usually allows a false one to take its place.
462
Filling in details for the events that we more or less still remember reflects real history into nonsense.
463
Ever since I was young, my parents have kept a yearly photo album of our family.
464
I also contributed in documenting my childhood through my love of filming my own movies, but we usually have the same conversation when we discuss what's in them.
465
Would I really remember so much of my childhood if these photos and videos were never taken?
466
There's a problem with the twist in Before Your Eyes that reminds me of this dilemma.
467
You see, the game acts as if the person lying is the same as the person being lied to, but they're not.
468
Because it turns out that the main character of this game knew the truth the whole time, that he was the one who actually came up with this fake life we've just been shot through.
469
So in the context of the game, I was the delusional one.
470
I thought this was my life, but in fact someone I thought was me, had made up these memories for me.
471
It's a really small thing to be critical of, but what follows from this dynamic shapes the entire story the game wants to tell.
472
I'm still not sure who the player is supposed to be in all this.
473
Are we Benjamin Buren or aren't we?
474
But that just makes the story so much more compelling in the context of false memory.
475
It isn't very often that we become adamantly invested in something that never happened, but this vividness is a key part of the false memories in Alzheimer's.
476
It's just another way you lose fragments of yourself to the disease.
477
Dementia isn't brutal only because you lose yourself though, your autonomy and various parts of your identity.
478
The most frightening thing about it to me is the loss of the world, the journey into a realm that evades understanding.
479
This is what the sixth stage of Alzheimer's is known for.
480
Patients have no clue where they are, who they're with, any concept of time, what they're wearing, sometimes can't remember their name, sometimes the names of objects.
481
All of it is distorted, gazed at through a glass darkly.
482
Reality thrashes about angrily, miles away from here in the distance, like a dream.
483
In his consideration of space and time, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer makes the remark that our waking life
484
and our dreams represent two different ways of reading the same book.
485
Our systematic reading is real life, the time when everything flows cohesively.
486
But when we're done trying to study, we sometimes continue to flip through the pages, read in a disconnected method, without cohesion.
487
I once had a nightmare I haven't been able to forget since the night I had it.
488
In it, an AI slowly and torturously reversed my consciousness back through time, leaving me nothing more than an empty, unblinking reflex machine.
489
It was chemo for the cancer of thought.
490
Now I could think nothing.
491
Would only ever think nothing.
492
Maybe it was because I had just read I Have No Mouth and I Am a Scream before bed.
493
A book, by the way, whose title quite suits dementia.
494
But if you can't even say to yourself anymore that you can think.
495
If no thoughts run and an uncomfortable silence fills your head, can you use yourself to confirm that you exist with any certainty?
496
Or is life itself then degraded to an inescapable dream, an idol flipping through the pages of space and time?
497
People with dementia are not thoughtless or void of sentience.
498
There's more evidence than not that they haven't fully lost themselves.
499
It's more accurate to say that they cannot express their identity, cannot fully resemble it.
500
Even their body can no longer step into the role.
501
The thoughts they think may be entirely incoherent most of the time, but they're still people.
502
That doesn't necessarily answer the question though.
503
Unlike what Descartes would have me believe, it's not the world I need to doubt, it's my own mind.
504
I reach out to touch this world and get a taste of my undoing.
505
I can only ever question what's happening to my brain because of the way my symptoms manifest themselves in the world,
506
because of the way they culminate into this dreamlike state.
507
The world has always been presupposed.
508
So though I may not be thoughtless, as the world crumbles around me into a dream, I'll ask again, am I certain I really exist?
509
A man's dreams span years, and Junji Ito's The Long Dream, taking up multiple lifetimes in a single night, and when he wakes up the next morning,
510
his body ages as if he had lived those years.
511
When he does wake up, trying to remember where he is is like trying to remember something he did on a random afternoon decades ago.
512
It… well, it takes him a moment.
513
After a while, he can't tell reality apart from his dreams.
514
But as the length of his dreams grow longer and longer, pushing close to a thousand years a night, his body ages far beyond any possible human limit,
515
transforming him into a genuinely tragic kind of being.
516
He fossilizes in his bed during the night, crumbles to dust that morning.
517
The doctors are baffled.
518
But the question I have is, in the end, which to him was really the dream?
519
I think there are several comparisons that can be made between this story and life in a demented state.
520
It probably seems like every strenuous attempt to preserve what's left of an already scrambled mind ages the brain faster
521
and faster as it decays.
522
cannot remember, learn, or understand.
523
But even in these later stages, the constant debilitating confusion can give way to an instantaneous and lucid clarity.
524
They're still in there somewhere, drifting and unable to express themselves properly except for these impossible instances.
525
I bet.
526
I bet you can actually feel the interval of time between every final moment of clarity growing larger and noticeably larger, until you finally had your last.
527
you appreciate it?
528
As we get closer and closer to the end of it all, the decline can be rapid.
529
The final stages of dementia are without description.
530
Without description because all symbolic powers have been lost.
531
First-hand representation is not possible.
532
Late-stage dementia is thus defined by what is lost, the reality of which cannot ever be approached nor comprehended.
533
That you have lost anything at all is not even recognized, and yet it is around that gaping void that every aspect of daily life continually orbits.
534
There's an ancient Greek story that details a competition between two expert painters.
535
One of them paints grapes so convincing that birds swoop down from the sky to try and eat them.
536
But his competitor paints a curtain.
537
After the first painter has displayed his work, he tells the other to move the curtain aside so that he can show off his masterpiece.
538
But there is nothing behind the curtain.
539
The curtain is all there is.
540
The story reminds me of the last album cover for Everywhere at the End of Time.
541
Compared to the other covers, this is perhaps the most distinct.
542
And yet, even now, we cannot define this empty form.
543
A door with tape on it.
544
A blank canvas.
545
A picture frame with nothing to display.
546
Every one of these is a guess, but they all represent a lost medium.
547
There is nothing behind the curtain.
548
Because the depths have now dried up.
549
All that's left of a previously profound world is a barren moonscape with a surface of bedrock.
550
Impenetrable and vast and infinitely shallow.
551
The final year looks pretty much like you'd expect it to.
552
Endless days spent lying motionless in bed, unable to communicate when you're feeling too hot or too cold.
553
Speech limited to slurred gibberish.
554
And then there are the rashes and sweaty blisters, forming along your stiff body next to any unexplainable bruises.
555
The second to last thing to go is the ability to smile. And sometimes that's it.
556
But other times?
557
Well other times it's not.
558
Sometimes there's something more.
559
There's a mind-boggling phenomenon called terminal lucidity.
560
It sometimes happens to those people whose brains have been in decline for many years right before their death.
561
Suddenly they'll regain some level of cognitive ability.
562
This can mean anything from a wordless but knowing exchange to an impossible restoration of all their memories.
563
Then they die, typically within a few hours.
564
This last hurrah could last for minutes, or it could last for days.
565
The phenomenon is spoken of in golden, mythic terms.
566
The effect on ignorant families is devastating.
567
It can feel like they've lost their loved one all over again.
568
But for those in the know, these final moments can provide closure.
569
What's left of their cognitive faculties in this moment are only shadows, dancing the dance of misery.
570
Truth is, they're already gone.
571
All of this is just the afterlight glow of a star gone out in some distant heaven, yet to vanish from our skies.
572
But eventually the light does dim, and then they forget how to breathe.
573
Forgetting sets a limit to the way we experience our existence.
574
Dementia is like a drain at the bottom of the universe.
575
It pulls every part of reality down into it.
576
And yet, even when there is nothing left, even after every experience you've ever had, the ability to experience has been taken,
577
this drain is the one thing that remains.
578
What are we in life but a whisper?
579
A long, drowned out, breathless whisper.
580
Come, let's watch together as that whisper of the world rolls away and enjoy the memory of it while we can.
581
There will be no encore.
582
I'm not sure what you're doing.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Fear of Forgetting”. This video has 582 sentences and 8076 words to shadow. The speech runs for 49:13. The speaker talks at a natural 164 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 79% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| dementia noun | /dɪˈmɛnʃə/ | A progressive decline in cognitive function due to damage or disease in the brain beyond what might be expected from normal aging. Areas particularly affected… |
| amyloid noun | /ˈæmɪlɔɪd/ | A waxy compound of protein and polysaccharides that is found deposited in tissues in amyloidosis. |
| caretaker noun | /ˈkɛɹˌteɪ.kɚ/ | Someone who takes care of a place or thing; someone looking after a place, or responsible for keeping it in good repair. |
| static adjective | /ˈstæt.ɪk/ | Unchanging; that cannot or does not change. |
| curtain noun | /ˈkɜɹt(ə)n/ | A piece of cloth covering a window, bed, etc. to offer privacy and keep out light. |
| chiasmus noun | /kaɪˈæzməs/ | An inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases. |
| delusion noun | /dɪˈl(j)uːʒ(ə)n/ | An adamant belief in a falsehood despite incontestable evidence. |
| descriptivism noun | The practice of describing realistic forms, as opposed to prescribing idealistic norms, of linguistic usage. | |
| conceal verb | /kənˈsil/ | To hide something from view or from public knowledge, to try to keep something secret. |
| symptom noun | /ˈsɪm(p)təm/ | A perceived change in some function, sensation or appearance of a person that indicates a disease or disorder, such as fever, headache or rash; strictly, a… |
| void adjective | /vɔɪd/ | Containing nothing; empty; not occupied or filled. |
| graduation noun | /ˌɡɹæd͡ʒuˈeɪʃən/ | The action or process of graduating and receiving a diploma for completing a course of study (such as from an educational institution). |
| chromosome noun | /ˈkɹoʊməˌsoʊm/ | A linear arrangement of condensed DNA and associated proteins (such as chaperone proteins) which contains the genetic material (genome) of an organism. |
| eerie adjective | /ˈɪɚi/ | Inspiring fear, especially in a mysterious or shadowy way; strange, weird. |
| forgetfulness noun | /fəˈɡɛtfʊlnɪs/ | The quality of being forgetful; proneness to let slip from the mind. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| flip through verb | Synonym of thumb (“to turn the pages of (a book) in order to read it cursorily”). | |
| look away verb | To ignore something; to pretend not to have seen or noticed something; to avoid dealing with something. | |
| point out verb | To identify among a group of similar subjects, or in a scene where the subject might not be readily seen or noticed, with a gesture of the body. | |
| act out verb | /ˌækt ˈaʊ̯t/ | To perform something specific. |
| boil up verb | To cook or prepare by boiling. | |
| break out verb | To escape, especially forcefully or defiantly. | |
| clear out verb | To completely empty. | |
| come over verb | To affect in a sudden, unprecedented or surprising manner; to overwhelm a person's ordinarily contrary impulse. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Why should you think that there's anything wrong?
- Isn't that going to have some effect on us?
- Do you think there's something happening to her?
- Are you ready to hear that premise?
- Come on, who do you see?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to be |
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | have been using · has been trying |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been revealed · has now been revealed · have begun |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are suggested · can be caused · is caused |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 106 contractions and reduced forms, such as isn't, can't, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thoughtless /ˈθɔtləs/, thrust /θɹʌst/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: dementia /dɪˈmɛnʃə/, delusion /dɪˈl(j)uːʒ(ə)n/, graduation /ˌɡɹæd͡ʒuˈeɪʃən/, delusional /dɪˈluːʒənəl/, dimension /daɪˈmɛn.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: graduation /ˌɡɹæd͡ʒuˈeɪʃən/, forgetfulness /fəˈɡɛtfʊlnɪs/, inconvenient /ˌɪn.kənˈviːni.ənt/, delusional /dɪˈluːʒənəl/, philosopher /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like dementia, amyloid, caretaker.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.