It starts with the movies, dwells on a paradox of dementia — that it can allow someone to experience something again for the first time — and picks up another paradox — that it’s possible for someone to forget everything and still successfully follow enormously complex routines. I will illustrate the first from my guy (my husband-equivalent) Jacques Transue in the early stages of his life-ending dementia and the second from myself under the sway of a powerful steroid drug. This will be a lot less grim than it sounds.
Then some professorial reflections on what it’s all about. I’m sorry; the professor comes along with the story-teller, it’s a package deal.
Movie time. First the lists. From my 5/25/25 posting “Movies”:
There are three lists, all ordered chronologically.
The main list is Arnold’s Favorites: movies that have given me pleasure, that I have watched repeatedly (five or more times), and that I recommend enthusiastically to others. This is a personal thing, as idiosyncratic as the topics I post about on this blog; probably no one else would favor these 14 movies.
… The second list is of those Greatest Movies of All Time that I have viewed. The third list began life as Movies for the Day the Dog Died (to soothe my Columbus household on that unhappy occasion), but should be seen as something like Movies to Chase Grief Away. Again, these work for me; many comedy movies do not (to be therapeutic for me, a movie has to be either good-hearted or extremely silly).
From the third list I pick two — A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) — because they were great favorites of my guy Jacques. A fact that became pointedly significant when his memory began to wither away.
Early in his time in a dementia care facility in Menlo Park (not far from our Palo Alto condo), on holidays our daughter Elizabeth and I would spring him from the place — which he believed was in a location Elizabeth and I came to call New Ohiylvania (New Jersey / Ohio / Pennsylvania, but absolutely not California) — and drive him to the condo for lunch. plus entertainment in the form of one of his favorite movies, on DVD.
This got us first, astonishment on J’s part, since he recognized the condo as our California home. “How did you do that?” he’d gasp, and I’d supply some dumb answer like “I learned a shortcut”. You absolutely do not want to explain actual fact, to correct him, or otherwise unsettle the construction of his own reality; you play along, try to figure out what he believes at the moment and get in synch with it, however absurd it might seem — because you are not going to fix any of it, though with some skill and a lot of luck you can make him happy.
Again for the first time. Then the movie. He didn’t recognize the name, so we just said we had a movie for him we liked and thought he would enjoy. And he did, thoroughly. Having all the same responses, to the same things, in the same places, that he’d had when we’d watched the DVD together, back before The Great Forgetting. Exactly the same wording, sometimes. Never anticipating what was about to unfold, but always delighted when it did. Inadvertently, we had given him a sweet gift.
I don’t know if the phenomenon — enjoying some experience again for the first time — has a name, but the general phenomenon is well known in the dementia care community, when caregivers stage repeated celebrations of the very same event — a birthday, say, or even wedding. (Practical tip: you can use the very same decorations, but you’re going to need fresh cake.)
People sometimes find my attitude about the phenomenon offensively jaunty, but I see no down side here; it’s all gravy, and for caregivers like me it’s a moment of sheer pleasure in the incredibly painful and wearing duties of dementia care (12 years that did in fact cut off my career and sent me into a long low-grade depression; I’m not pissing and moaning about that, it’s just a fact, and in any case I could not possibly have done otherwise, but I did have to find a new life for myself).
Now, about the memory part of Again For the First Time. At one level — I’ll call it conscious memory (because we’re aware of it and can talk about it) — J had simply lost the memories of his favorite movies. But fully fleshed-out traces of those memories — subconscious memory (so-called because it’s out of our awareness and unavailable for inspection) — hovered in his mind and triggered his evaluations of them.
And now those movies are extra-special-good in my eyes, because of what they meant for J in that terrible time.
Running on empty. Or: how can you know what to do when you don’t know anything about where you are? From my 7/30/26 posting “Turning point 2”,
the story of when prednisone saved my life, from a potentially fatal asthma attack … and then (apparently) wiped out all of my conscious memory, leaving me on the streets of Palo Alto without any idea where I was or how I got there or what I was doing. But I still remembered how memory works (I’m a part-time cognitive psychologist, after all), and was able to believe that my subconscious would get me wherever I was supposed to be, if I just trusted it and did whatever fanciful thing it came up with. Just followed my instincts. It got me home on the streets of Palo Alto, and then to the parking area in the back, upon which I (still in subconscious mode) drove my car to the linguistics department at Stanford, just a little late for a faculty meeting.
There’s nothing mystic about this, though it does strike some people as awfully close to the woo-woo line. It just involves subconscious memory, which can often continue to supply routinized and practiced performance — knowing how — at a high level of accuracy, even in the face of fairly severe degradation of conscious memory.
Notes on memory. First. terminology. Psychologists’ distinguishing between episodic memory (for events) and semantic memory (for factual information) divides up conscious memory (explicit memory, in a standard terminology, employing a different terminological metaphor from mine: their ‘unfolded’), as distinguished from subconscious memory (implicit memory, ‘entwined’).
Then, two observations about all these kinds of memory: they are, on the one hand, relatively stable, persisting over long periods of time; but on the other hand, constantly being reshaped. The first observation encourages the conception of memory as a kind of storehouse or treasury, from which we take contents as needed (except that we don’t actually take them out, but merely (metaphorically) make copies of the bits we need for the tasks at hand). The second observation encourages instead a view of memory as some kind of dynamic program for finding clusters of information; over short periods of time, the changes in what can be recovered are scarcely noticeable, but then they accumulate.
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