![]() She has synesthesia, or the ability to see colors when hearing music. She has a photographic memory and can memorize any fact shared with her. She lives her life strapped in her wheelchair to avoid falling out when her legs or arms spasm, and sometimes she can’t control the drool that dribbles from her mouth.ĭespite her inability to control her body, Melody’s mind is perfect. It’s not that she’s too shy - the eleven-year-old has cerebral palsy and is unable to speak her thoughts. Melody Brooks is a fifth-grader who longs to be able to talk to her classmates. I got around to reading it this past week. So when I saw the book on display during a weekend visit to Barnes & Noble, I grabbed a copy. I promised the class I would add the title to my to-read list. Several students recommended Sharon Draper’s novel because their teacher was reading it aloud in class and they were enjoying it. During a round of questions and answers, they asked me to name my favorite books, then shared their own favorites. Clearly, these drugs are only the first efforts to improve the cognitive function in dementias and represent some modest success for rational drug development.I was introduced to “Out of My Mind” by fourth-graders at McKinley Elementary School in Ottawa, Ill. Several cholinesterase inhibitors are available around the world, and are of relatively comparable efficacy although they vary somewhat in their side effects. The chapter presents data on the effects of cholinergic drugs in normal individuals and discusses the implications for cholinergic cognitive enhancement. The effects of cholinergic drugs in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other dementias are also discussed. The chapter reviews the cholinergic hypothesis particularly as it relates to the role of nicotine in attention. In particular intimately related to arousal and attention are executive functions, also called frontal lobe functions, although their biological substrates involve many brain regions. The higher order cognitive abilities depend on attention. The chapter discusses the relationship between attentional mechanisms and higher order cognitive processes such as frontal lobe functions in health and disease, and speculates about the relationship between attention and wisdom. This chapter focuses on attention and its important role in cognition. Her scholarly interests have increasingly shifted towards the Health Humanities: with an MA in Literature and Medicine, she currently researches for a book on dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature of the 20th Century at King’s College London, UK, funded by the Wellcome Trust. Martina Zimmermann has fifteen years of research and teaching experience in Pharmacology, and is Privatdozentin at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. ![]() Linking literary scholarship to the medico-scientific understanding of dementia as a neurodegenerative condition, this book argues that, first, patients’ articulations must be made central to dementia discourse and second, committed alleviation of caregiver burden through social support systems and altered healthcare policies requires significantly altered views about aging, dementia, and Alzheimer’s patients. It also analyses how these accounts engage with the culturally dominant Alzheimer’s narrative that centres on dependence and vulnerability, and addresses how they relate to discourses of gender and aging. It contrasts third-person caregiver and first-person patient accounts from different languages and a range of media, focusing on the poetical and political questions these narratives raise: what images do narrators appropriate what narrative plot do they adapt and how do they draw on established strategies of life-writing. This is the first book-length exploration of the thoughts and experiences expressed by dementia patients in published narratives over the last thirty years. Thrailkill, University of North Carolina, USA ![]() The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing offers an important intervention at a critical time, and deserves to meet with a wide readership.’ - Jane F. ‘This very fine study reflects capacious knowledge and insight into a condition that, as the author suggests, is one of the most complex and fraught for patients and caregivers, and one of the most misunderstood by policy makers. 'Despite the recent spate of books about Alzheimer’s disease by doctors, patients, and caregivers, no other writer to my knowledge has attempted to do what the humanities scholar and research scientist Martina Zimmermann has accomplished here: an analysis of dementia narratives attuned to the medical, political, sociological, ethical, and poetic aspects-that is, the full human experience-of living with inexorable, unforgiving cognitive decline.' - Eileen Gillooly, Columbia University, USA This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
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