Tru here.  I have heard others get offended when folks “dumb-down” their conversation, implying we as PWD (Persons With Dementia) are stupid.  At my current stage of progression I appreciate that action instead.

My brain still holds amazing clarity and brilliant insight — in scattered, seemingly-random floating sparks.  It is just so very difficult for me to find the particle I am looking for because the distance between them is growing exponentially.  I am not stupid, but at this rate my bits of brilliant insight will be scattered across space like the sparkling milky way.

Every sentence you say is a jigsaw puzzle of scrambled sounds that my brain is trying to make sense of.  So PLEASE pause between phrases and speak slowly in order to give my brain a chance to compose meaning for those seemingly-random sounds.

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Similar to others with dementia symptoms, one loud sound or bright flash of light creates a pinball-effect in my brain, with thoughts bouncing long after the sensory stimulation occurs, but not able to stay in one spot long enough to assign meaning for any piece.  And unfortunately, as time goes on, individual moments of stimulation feel progressively intense.

Maybe, just as pain stimulus of an infant becomes progressively desensitized with time out of the womb, maybe memory is used to hold that de-sensitization process.  Maybe as memory is less and less able to hold current events, sensory stimulus appears exponentially stronger, because there is no experiential context in the memory.  This MAY be a reasonable theory.

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I typed these pieces of notes from my cell phone, hoping that I could later finish and connect the thoughts.  It has been over eight hours and I can’t seem to even grasp what I was talking about, let alone get to the point where I could continue thoughts or bring threads together like I had hoped.  Posting as-is with picture I spent most of the day creating.

Update:  I have been asked how I created picture.  I spent a couple hours making little black dots of varying intensity in my basic desired shape on white index paper (because took several Photoshop courses 10yrs ago & use Photoshop several times a day, so was sure I could use Photoshop to make it a negative).  Tried each one of the Photoshop filters & could not find what was looking for …  apparently I remembered wrong.  So went back over each filter again looking for alternatives.  Found several filters that emphasize edges (don’t remember names).  After that I selected background “space” & painted it dark purple, then subtly revised coloring with another filter (don’t remember which) creating slight shadings of blues and reds from the background purple.  Then used the clone tool finalizing the shapes for picture.  Using filters takes me a lot of time because (just like finding physical tools in physical drawers) I keep forgetting where things are and what they do, so every few minutes I need to back & open drawers to look again.  Sometimes I can look straight at a physical tool I use daily (like a hair barrette) and not register its use, so it is no surprise that looking at a word in “filter” column of Photoshop menu does not trigger memories for its function.  At any rate it took slightly over 8hrs to compose picture but I think it portrays my thought.  😀

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