Dementia: A Body without Brain (Cognitive Abilities)

Abstract

Dementia is like social death before the actual death; a paradoxical life that does not allow one to live life as they used to live before the affliction. It is such an evasive and pervasive disease that the impact it would have on the life of people is unimaginable. This condition flares up the eternal quest of mankind; whether the brain is greater than the body or vice versa? The person suffering from dementia becomes a sort of illusionary lost being lost in the incoherent, insensible, unexplored ethos of his own mental web and can no longer associate or participate with the environment.

In trying to understand dementia, the researcher has looked at a number of issues surrounding the interplay of the body, the mind, and personhood. What does it mean to be a person without the sharpness of mind or the collective experience of his memories or a personality that is built upon the basis of cultural and historical context? Would this person be the same one as before without the sum of these things? Is society accommodative of people with dementia? Is there the same sort of support structure around this disease of the mind as there is for many other physical ailments? Is the existence of humankind totally defined by cerebral power and is a person completely destroyed when the brain cannot sustain psychological connectivity? Would there be any meaning attached to a demented person’s existence if his existence is embedded in his life history, engagement with others, and his bodily forms?  Through this paper, the researcher has tried to look at these questions from the point of view of the demented protagonist in the novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova and how these tragic and painful experiences are accommodated by society at large.