The Forgetting

"The Forgetting is a very lucid and well-written portrait of Alzheimer’s disease. It gives a sort of biography and history of the disease, using medical and anecdotal sources and case histories. Each chapter begins with a quote from an Alzheimer’s sufferer, the first of which is “I have lost myself” which is something that the first diagnosed Alzheimer’s sufferer reportedly said. The book talks about people having really lost themselves to this disease, which it perceives as an entity in itself, almost like an alien invasion. He treats it as this thing that’s come upon us with epidemic proportions. Although the world would be a better place without it, there’s an awful lot that we can learn about ourselves and the way that we work and think by looking at the disease. It helps us to see layers of the mind. Schenk discusses quite a well-known theory: he maps out the human brain and shows the development of Alzheimer’s in its various stages, and shows how it’s an almost true undoing of the brain, which unravels in the exact order that it develops. His idea is that by looking at the disease and the progress of it you can actually learn a lot about the way that the brain works and how it develops in our early life and understand more about what it is that makes us tick. I’m not sure there’s anything that people who suffer from Alzheimer’s do that the rest of us don’t do – they just do it in an extreme and alarming way. I think that’s why it’s such an interesting disease, because we can all relate to it. Not just because we’re afraid of it, but because we already know what it’s like to experience some of those things in a more watered-down way."