Bruce Miller
speaker
109 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2022
last heard Mar 2022
Bruce Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Why does a language circuit become vulnerable to a specific molecule?
Ultimately, I think we're going to be able to get rid of that bad molecule, so the diagnosis becomes an inroad into treatment.
And then maybe the most interesting of all these language deficits is the one that begins in the left anterior temporal lobe, which we knew almost nothing about until we started studying these diseases.
And this is called the semantic variant.
And what happens is people lose words that they accumulated early in life, in particular nouns.
Often, it's birds or animals or a type of food.
Remarkably, they lose entire concept of what that animal or that word consisted of.
The knowledge that is so much part of growing up as a child, we learn that there's an animal and then a bird and then a hawk and then a red-tailed hawk.
All of that gets stripped away as we lose the anterior temporal lobes.
These people are extremely interesting because sometimes that releases visual creativity.
We've written about people with this type of dementia where artistry often heralds the onset of the illness.
One of the things that I have learned as I've studied these different disorders is that we must focus on strengths and also vulnerabilities that were present early in life if we're really going to understand the mechanisms of these illnesses.
Yes.
For us, the most salient example is the musician Ravel, who developed progressive language disorder.
And he wrote Bolero before he got sick, but we know he was soon to have a profound deficit in language.
And this is a story that we see over and over again, a creative burst in music and art.
This is really the beginning of a disease where the front part of the brain turns down, the back part of the brain where we perceive and create art turns up.
I'm profoundly grateful for the dive.
I think it changed me as a person.
It made me see the pain that people go through in a way I never had quite seen it before.
Showing 61–80 of 109 · page 4 of 6
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