Dementia from Two Perspectives with Cindy Weinstein and Bruce Miller, MD
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What is the premise of Finding the Right Words and why did Emily invite Cindy and Bruce?
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You're listening to the Nocturnist Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. Today, I speak with Professor Cindy Weinstein and Dr. Bruce Miller. Cindy is currently the Eli and Edith Broad Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology, where she has worked since 1989. From 2018 to 2019, she was an Atlantic Fellow in the Global Brain Health Institute, based at UCSF and Trinity College in Dublin, where she studied neurology with an interdisciplinary group of scientists, artists, social scientists, and physicians. Bruce holds the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professorship in Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, where he directs the Memory and Aging Center.
As a behavioral neurologist whose work emphasizes brain behavior relationships, he has reported on the emergence of artistic ability, personality, cognition, and emotion with the onset of neurodegenerative disease. He's been awarded the Potemkin Award from the American Academy of Neurology and elected to the National Academy of Medicine. Together, they have written a book called Finding the Right Words, a story of literature, grief, and the brain, about Cindy and her father, Jerry Weinstein, who lived and died with Alzheimer's disease. Before we dive in, I've asked Cindy to read an excerpt from the book. Here's Cindy.
Thank you, Emily. I am 58 years old, the age my father was when my mother called to tell me he had Alzheimer's disease. I am also in Berkeley, the same city I was in when I was 25 and got that phone call. A part of me has been frozen in that moment, even though over 30 years have intervened, during which time I got married, had two children, worked at Caltech, wrote some books, and went to my father's funeral. I have returned to Berkeley to mourn the loss of my father. In Judaism, this is called sitting Shiva, more than 20 years after he died. To say goodbye to him in the way I know best, which is to study, think, and write a book. I have always known that unlike many memoirs about Alzheimer's disease, the book I would write about my father was one I wouldn't write alone.
Having spent 30 years studying literature, I know that only someone who knows a field inside out can explain its complexities in a way that can be understood by all readers. Thus, I asked Dr. Bruce Miller, founder of the Memory and Aging Center. to write a book with me about dementia so I could tell the story of my father's Alzheimer's disease, and he could explain the science of dementia to people who may not have a degree in neurology. What Bruce probably didn't know when he agreed to write this book was that I was also asking him to sit Shiva with me. How could he when I didn't know I was sitting Shiva? But his empathic embrace of my story and his willingness to use it as a departure point to help others dealing with dementia has allowed me to recover.
To recover from some of the pain of watching my beloved father become unglued and to recover memories of him.
Cindy and Bruce, thanks so much for being here today.
It's great to be with you, Emily.
Thank you for having us. So the book you've written is so unique because it's a dialogue.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the premise of Finding the Right Words and why did Emily invite Cindy and Bruce?
0:00–8:02
2
How does Cindy Weinstein describe her father’s early‑onset Alzheimer’s and the personal impact on her life?
8:02–15:33
3
What motivated Cindy to partner with a neurologist and how did their first meeting at UCSF happen?
15:33–22:35
4
How did Bruce Miller’s scientific background shape the book’s explanation of dementia?
22:35–33:40
5
What are the different types of language loss in dementia that Bruce explains?
33:40–42:08
6
Why does Cindy keep returning to Moby‑Dick and how does it relate to her grief narrative?
42:08–43:21