Languages are very abstract concept,
who decided that if I say the sound door,
that means something to us,
the door that we open to enter
a place and if I say the sound,
[NOISE] that's nothing, it doesn't mean anything,
but that's still a sound, it's
a very abstract concept we have learned since we
were young that these particular sounds are
associated with a particular meaning or concept.
There's a part in our brain that is
responsible at all times to sift through
all the sounds that you get from your environment
and allow you to differentiate between
ambient sound and language
sounds and then once you are able to process all of that,
you then attach the meaning
to each of the sounds and that's
how language even starts to be processed in the brain.
There are other parts sort of take over for you to add
the richness and texture of what it is that you are
being told how you're going to respond to it, etc.
These are other things that
we're not going to cover today
but that initial process
of understanding the sounds of language is what's
being affected in these patients and to show that's
why they start blanking
on words because they can't hear them,
they cannot hear what they sound like and
also they start having difficulty
listening to people talk,
especially if they are being told something that's really
long because its way more sounds,
if I were to tell you,
"Get out," these are two sounds, two syllables.
It's way easier to process than if I say,
"Make sure to get ready we are going now for dinner.
We're going to be late. It starts at 08:00 PM."
These is a lot of sounds
that the brain now has to process,
for people who have this variant of Alzheimer's disease,
will have a really hard time with
these long sentences as opposed to shorter sentences.
[NOISE] As the disease progresses,
they may have more and more difficulty with language so
that communication might be really impaired.
Some patients do become sort of close to mute or
are unable to really provide any meaningful conversation.
Early on it might also affect
calculation faculty
because we're going to see this is the part
of the brain that's close to where we process
sounds of language and then
they may start developing more visual problems similar to
the first group that I showed you right before this one.
These patients probably also have
a lot of memory problems that
might be hard to detect because if you cannot speak,
you may not have an opportunity to know that you forgot
something because it may not come up in a conversation.
Let me show you just a video of
a patient that has this and this is
a test that we give to this patient in order to see how
they're processing the sounds of language.
The test is really simple.
We ask them to repeat a sentence and
repeating a sentence does not
require you to really understand it,
or that it requires you to do is to be able to process
the sounds of that sentence and reproduce these sounds.
People may not be able to understand what they're saying,
but they may still be able to repeat it.
However, people with this Alzheimer's disease
have a really hard time.
Let me just play this real quick.
Can you repeat this phrase?
Today was a warm and sunny day.
Today was a wonder and fundy day [inaudible]
Today was a warm and sunny day.
Can you repeat that again?
Yes, today was a sun was, oh God.
Summer and...I'm
trying to go too fast.
It's tricky, isn't it? Let's start with something easier.
How about today is Monday?
Today is Monday.
How about the flowers were in the park?
The flowers were in the block.
You notice how he's really struggling with these sounds
even when those sentences were relatively simple.
What's interesting, and if you notice,
there were some errors in the words that he made,
they sounded like what you're
saying but they were not the right words.
He said summer as opposed to sunny day.
This is an error that often these patients make
because as they are searching for the sounds,
other sounds are being
grasped and the brain, and they're going there.
This is to show you where in the brain this is.
Again I'm going to
reorient it like we did the first time.
The front of the head or actually you can see here,
these are the top of the eyes.
That's the face here,
that's the back, this is
your left side, this is your right side.
I'm going to bring your attention to this part of
the brain where you see that there is a lot of
spaces like some of
these spaces here as compared to that side of the brain.
This is the right, this is the left.
This is part of
the parietal lobe which I showed you earlier,
but it's a little bit lower.
It is where we are
processing some of these sounds of language.
This is the reason why these patients struggle.