Dementia, sleep and daydreaming
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast. No. Uh, my name's Dennis Frost. I'm in my mid sixties at the moment. I was diagnosed with dementia almost six years ago now, which I found to be um a bit of a relief because I had a a finally a an explanation of some of the problems I've been having.
Dennis Frost, who since his dementia diagnosis is moved to tears by his favourite song, Black Star, by David Bowie.
I'ma take you home.
Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN. I'm Lynn Malcolm. Today, the experience of dementia. What new research is showing about the role of sleep and how people with some forms of dementia lose the ability to daydream.
So I've been working with individuals with frontotemporal dementia for almost 10 years now. And something that struck me was really that the individuals affected seem unable to use their imagination and to think in creative and flexible ways. And so at a conference many years ago, a colleague of mine asked me, do these patients daydream? And the question really resonated with me because nobody had asked that question before. And it's something that we take for granted, I think, within the dementia space, that there's this common sort of misperception that perhaps the individual is lost in their thoughts or lost in their own world.
Associate Professor Marin Arish and more from her research on daydreaming later. Dementia describes a collection of symptoms affecting thinking, behavior, and the ability to perform everyday tasks. It's the second leading cause of death of Australians, and there are around four hundred and forty thousand people living with some form of it. Dementia is an umbrella term for somewhere between one hundred and two hundred different conditions. Dennis Frost describes some of the problems he was facing before his diagnosis at the age of sixty.
The main catalyst was uh an episode I had in a a hardware store where someone came up to me and started talking about work. And I had no idea who this person was, but they had clearly a a very good understanding of who I worked with, where I worked, etcetera. And I later sort of worked out that that person worked in the administration section, the floor below us, but With that in the back of my mind, I started to realise that the people I've been working with for ten or fifteen years, if they were dressed differently or I met them outside of Where I expected to see them, I didn't recognise them. Um and I was teaching at that stage and then I realized Again, this is probably within the space of two or three weeks that all this happened, that um
this one class just didn't quite seem right this day and I eventually worked out the when a couple of students ask questions after about fifteen minutes or so that They weren't sitting where I expected them to sit, so the voices weren't matching up to the to the locations. Then the fun part started because I went along to G P uh explained to her what had been happening so She sent me on a path of some testing to try and eliminate bits and pieces. But the result was at the end of the first day I was told that I had dementia. I had two, three years, maybe eight years to live, up to maybe twenty, and I should go home and quietly retire.
Which he didn't do, by the way. Dennis was diagnosed with a type of younger onset dementia called semantic variant frontotemporal dementia. This means that he has prosopagnosia, a difficulty recognizing faces, and he often can't find the particular word he's looking for.
I had a an episode two days ago w 'cause my wife was gonna have the following day off and I thought I'd cook breakfast and I thought it would be an opportunity to to make an omelette. But I couldn't think of what the word omelet was. It took me five or ten minutes to f finally Come to the g the word omelette.
So how does that feel for you when you realise that you just not function as as well as you were?
Well Some aspects Can be frustrating, but a lot of the bits I now accept and I sp I've got a philosophy, you know, I've got dementia. What's your excuse? It's not a If you like a a fault on my part, it's a biochemical failing in front of a better description.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–5:24
2
What is frontotemporal dementia and how does it affect day‑dreaming?
5:24–13:34
3
How did Dennis Frost first realize something was wrong and get diagnosed?
13:34–24:07
4
Why is the ability to day‑dream important for creativity and mental health?
24:07–29:05