Dr. Sandra Weintraub

And as I worked more and more in this field, and as we made more progress, we began to realize that you don't wake up with dementia.

It starts 10, 20 years earlier.

And we started seeing people earlier and earlier and earlier.

So then I became really interested

in what is the earliest signs of a dementia.

We always think of memory loss, but in our case, we've discovered that you can have an aphasia as the first sign of a progressive dementia, or you can have visuospatial deficits, or you can have behavioral changes.

So I really got interested in what can these neurodegenerative diseases tell me about the human brain and how it works.

Um, then, uh, there was this thing called normal aging and I started seeing people who were worried about their memory, but they didn't have any problems when they were tested.

And so I saw people who were, seemed to be kind of normal for their age.

And then I saw people who were incredible that had memories like a 20 year old, you

And I got really interested in what is, you know, why do those people, how can they preserve their memory?

Those are very excellent questions.

So the first thing you asked was what is aphasia?

Aphasia is a term, I mean, if you wanna break it down from the Latin, it means without language or without speech.

And it is the term that's applied to a loss of the ability to communicate using words, understanding words, reading words, anything that has to do with your brain making words.

Usually it's due to a stroke.

but it can also be due to neurodegeneration in the part of the brain that controls your language function.

How long do you have?

Because...

So normal aging is if you take a thousand people between 65 and 85 and you give them a test and you get a total score on the test and then you average the score on that test, that's what's considered average for that age range, okay?