The dazzling drambuzy bird lost her song. From the Noah Saga
Of course, it didn’t nor could it happen all at once. Birds don’t wake up with Alzheimer’s disease. It creeps up on them slowly; in little dabs will do you, incubated nonsense codes, spin juices in the head that scramble the good codes and replace them with random colored spaghetti wire, and before long you have a daft bird on your hands.
All of the birds in the neighborhood knew how to sing their song and to understand the songs of their Meshpuhah as well as the tweeter of the birds that belonged to other clans, the ones not welcome under their particular oak tree or sour puss bush.
The stuck-up flamingo bird, the hohum of the harem, figured it out early, really early, that the Drambuzy had somehow lost some of her verve. She was known to be able to carry a tune all over the forest. She could sing songs of bug festivals, of orange sunsets, as well as misty buttermilk morning sky openings. She had a song for everything, from ginger plant droppings in the moonlight, glow worms at a festival, and especially when she would see a duck’s ass on top of the water with the rest of the mallard feasting on goodies on the bottom of a shallow pond. She could entertain birds of any feather. She could change the depth and breath of her song, and it was all because she had great width and huge depth in her song repertoire. Birds would sit around for hours listening to the Drambuzy sing and they would whistle back in appreciation of the Drambuzy concert tour.
Hohum noticed something on the 19th day of the spring of 03. Drambuzy sang just like she always did, with a long wide honest sound, but some of the rare upturned raptures were missing. Her voice seemed to be getting ordinary, really good but not really great, with the phrasing being off and even some of the delicate melodies oddly missing from her treasure chest of songs. The tunes were fine but not of her usual quality. At first the other birds thought that perhaps the Drambuzy was constipated, maybe because she had eaten too many bits and pieces of gravel that she thought were spaetzla. Later that spring it turns out that some of her rare song tweeters disappeared from her concerts and she stuck with the popular and overplayed songs like, got your worm by the tail, or prune more feathers you silly fool. As the days got hotter and hotter and the steam never disappeared even her simple songs started to lose that pretty something and she began to sound just like an ordinary prickly finch or a sap do what, do what what, and who really cares about their song. Hohum knew what was happening even in the early spring. Drambuzy was losing the subtle words from songs. It took a while but then even the simpler sing along birdcalls became vague and in disarray. That steady decline in the complexity of bird song language is the way the disease marches on from the subtle erosions of what birds know to the more obvious damages in the structure of the songs.
Months later when Drambuzy flew into a tree backwards and fell dead at the bottom of the trunk did Hohum realize that the poor popular bird had been getting more and more screwed up by the avian form of Alzheimer’s disease. The subtle bird brain knowledge erodes first and only then do the core builders of smarts disappear, so that not only are the songs missing but the demented bird picks at sticks instead of worms, and hardly recognizers their fellow bird brained mishpuhah.
So, it is with people. You don’t wake up with Alzheimer’s disease. Instead the disease sneaks out and around and over a brain in tiny steps. It first affecting subtle facets of language and then it might continue on so that it is obvious to all who listen and pay attention to what is happening. It can affect mood, it can release inhibitions in little ways. The odd part is that even when much of common knowledge is no longer accessible, like recognition of the face of a loved one, our patient friend might still be able to bang out a tune on the piano. The main point though is that the disease moves up and about in little steps with subtle brain knowledge being damaged, spoiled first, and only much later does the disease show its blatant face.
One can see this happening in a particularly sad form in the gifted, such as writers like Iris Murdoch. Scientists have examined her last novel and noted that the subtlety of her language was not there. Her prose had become flatter, less interesting, less layered and unusual, more sophomoric. That could see the disease sneaking up in her brain from an analysis of her use of language in her last published novel. Maybe all diseases start subtle, hardly noticeable and later when the disease has matured can we see that we are in trouble. How damn sneaky it all is. 1
Read more if you like in an article reprinted from the British Neuroscience Journal Brain (Garrard, et. al.) for an analysis of how Murdoch’s writing seemed to fall apart in subtle steps as her disease took more and more hold of her brain.1
The effects of very early Alzheimer’s disease on the characteristics of writing by a renowned author
Peter Garrard 1*, Lisa M. Maloney 2, John R. Hodges 3, and Karalyn Patterson 3
1 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London
2 Defence Services Medical Rehabilitation Unit, Headley Court, Epsom, Surrey
3 MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit, Cambridge, UK
* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Peter Garrard, E-mail: p.garrard@ucl.ac.uk; garrard@cnbc.cmu.edu