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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the show. There's a high chance

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Speaker 1: that at some point in your life you have looked

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Speaker 1: up at a cloud and thought, oh, a horse, Oh,

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Speaker 1: oh a butterfly. Oh it's Luigi from Mario Kart. I

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Speaker 1: saw my son Wolfgang do it for the first time today,

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Speaker 1: and me being me, my brain, being my brain, I

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Speaker 1: started to wonder, is there a connection with what I've

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Speaker 1: seen wolf you just do with seeing shapes and clouds,

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Speaker 1: and why it can be so intensely difficult to be

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Speaker 1: around a loved one with dementia. So I started doing

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Speaker 1: some reading and look, I might not be right, but

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Speaker 1: being curious about this question has helped me a lot today,

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Speaker 1: and I hope it helps you too. We'll get stuck

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Speaker 1: into it right after the brain A Welcome to the show.

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Speaker 1: This is better than Yesterday. Every weeks in twenty thirteen,

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Speaker 1: I promise that you'll hear something that will make today

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Speaker 1: better than yesterday. Does what it says on the box,

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Speaker 1: and I'm grateful I can be with you here today.

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Speaker 1: Mon Namesosh she Ginsburg. Thanks for being a part of

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Speaker 1: the show. Thanks to the crew who came out to

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Speaker 1: story Club this weekend. Next show is on sale right now.

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Speaker 1: And that's what I reckon is going to be in

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Speaker 1: the show in May. It's a Sydney Comedy Festival special show.

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Speaker 1: It's going to be a doozy tickets in the show notes,

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Speaker 1: So get among that. So clouds, yeah, clouds. Let's walk

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Speaker 1: back a bit. My wife, Audrey, she has quite the

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Speaker 1: green thumb through her. I have come to see the

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Speaker 1: green things around me is more than just trees and

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Speaker 1: bushes and flowers. I now see eucalypse and Mella lucaus,

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Speaker 1: monsters and hydrangeas. We have these beautiful garden beds at

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Speaker 1: our place, which provides with an abundance of things that

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Speaker 1: we eat through the year. We have a house full

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Speaker 1: of delightfully large leafed plants which trail all over the place.

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Speaker 1: She propagates them and hybridizes them. I really like it.

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Speaker 1: It's really nice. And so today was kind of like

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Speaker 1: the big day out of plants. We hoofed it out

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Speaker 1: of the house out to the foot of the Blue Mountains.

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Speaker 1: If you're not from Sydney, I grew up in Brisbane,

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Speaker 1: so look it's a while away to the I think

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Speaker 1: it's called like the Plant Collectors Fair or something like that.

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Speaker 1: Two hundred or so small scale nursery selling juvenile versions

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Speaker 1: of some of the most wonderfully and rare marvelous plants

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Speaker 1: around it, including some extraordinarily delightful native plants. Now from

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Speaker 1: our house or we live out by the ocean, to

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Speaker 1: Penrith is a little over an hour's drive at one

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Speaker 1: hundred and something ks an hour, or approximately twenty six

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Speaker 1: Are we there, yets? Because Wolfgang and both dogs joined

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Speaker 1: us for the adventure. Now sometime between are we there yet?

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Speaker 1: Number thirteen? And are we there yet? Number fourteen? Right

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Speaker 1: around when the iPad battery ran out, Wolfe went quiet,

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Speaker 1: so I sneakily checked the rear vision mirror. He's not

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Speaker 1: a slave, but he's staring out of the window and

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Speaker 1: staring up at the sky. He's just staring, And after

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Speaker 1: a few minutes he says, hammer. What's that, mate? You

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Speaker 1: can see a hammer in the sky. Yeah. I lean

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Speaker 1: forward over the wheel and I look up, and sure

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Speaker 1: enough I can see this lumpy cumulus cloud that look

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Speaker 1: like it's big. And I can absolutely understand that he

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Speaker 1: can recognize a hammer in that shape. Isn't that interesting?

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Speaker 1: We both know it's a cloud, but our brain is

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Speaker 1: so good at recognizing pattern as the first thing we

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Speaker 1: think about is a hammer. About another minute goes by bunny,

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Speaker 1: and on we went about twelve Are we there? Yets

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Speaker 1: later we get to the horse racing track ap by

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Speaker 1: Panthers Stadium. We get about our mission to secure a

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Speaker 1: decent banks here and a flowering gum. And as we

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Speaker 1: wandered between the booths of the climbing as the climbers

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Speaker 1: and the fruit trees and stuff, I was thinking about

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Speaker 1: what he had discovered today as a word for when

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Speaker 1: our brain does that, It's called apophenia. It's when your

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Speaker 1: brain sees patterns that aren't really there. When we correctly

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Speaker 1: identifying something by only being aware of a sliver of it, well,

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Speaker 1: that's called pattern recognition. And it's a very very important thing.

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Speaker 1: It's a it's a survival mechanism that's allowed us to

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Speaker 1: be who we are. It's really important pattern recognition. It's

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Speaker 1: how we can recognize words, understand the shapes that another

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Speaker 1: person makes in their face regulating to their emotional state.

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Speaker 1: It helps us solve puzzles identifying and reacting to patterns.

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Speaker 1: It's pretty much what our brains do better than anything else.

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Speaker 1: To the point when we're making choices that we aren't

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Speaker 1: even aware of, because we can correctly most of the time,

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Speaker 1: predict what's going to happen next, so often that our

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Speaker 1: response becomes somewhat automatic. When I first went out of

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Speaker 1: a motorbike, I was shit scared. I was on edge.

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Speaker 1: I've got my learners when my wife was pregnant, for

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Speaker 1: God's sake, head on swivel, hyper alert. Whereas this week

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Speaker 1: I was coming back over the Anzac Bridge in Sydney

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Speaker 1: in peak hour, I got Fu Manchu blasting in the headphones,

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Speaker 1: which is a lot of fun. Two cars up on

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Speaker 1: the right, I guess I must have noticed something in

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Speaker 1: the black hatchback, something about how close it was to

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Speaker 1: the car in front, or how it wabbled in the

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Speaker 1: lane just a little bit. I just started to accelerate immediately,

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Speaker 1: and sure enough, the hatchback pulls into my lane without indicating,

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Speaker 1: without looking for me. Wouldn't have hit me, but it

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Speaker 1: would not have been fun in that traffic. It was

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Speaker 1: only really once he was in front of me that

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Speaker 1: I realized what I'd done, That I'd identified a potential

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Speaker 1: threat based on subtle cues from thousands of hours of

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Speaker 1: riding by now gone into a preemptive protective mode and

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Speaker 1: only really become fully aware of this when I'm now

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Speaker 1: doing about forty five to put a couple of car

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Speaker 1: links between me and him in front of me, all

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Speaker 1: while singing along to King of the Road by Fu Manchu.

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Speaker 1: Our brains ability to identify a thing or a situation

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Speaker 1: based on seeing or experiencing only a fraction of it

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Speaker 1: is one of our superpowers. And as a group, our

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Speaker 1: pattern recognition traits are these incredibly and super important survival mechanisms.

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Speaker 1: So they're wide into the survival instincts, the fight or

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Speaker 1: flight stuff, so they're always looking out for something and

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Speaker 1: because of that, they can actually have, you know, false alarms.

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Speaker 1: And it's important that they're that highly wired because it's

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Speaker 1: better to jump at a shadow rather than being eaten

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Speaker 1: by a big, hungry quadruped hiding behind a rock. And

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Speaker 1: when they're wrong, when those pattern recognitions got wrong, it's cool.

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Speaker 1: As I mentioned Apathenium, when your brain se these patterns

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Speaker 1: that aren't really there, it doesn't care that it shows

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Speaker 1: up with false information. It's looking for the fastest path

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Speaker 1: to simplicity and closure. When we don't know what's going on,

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Speaker 1: we don't feel good. But even if it's the wrong thing,

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Speaker 1: if we've got an answer, we feel a little bit better.

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Speaker 1: And there's a bunch of different kinds of apathenia. The

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Speaker 1: one where we see the shape in the clouds, that's

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Speaker 1: called paradolia. It's part of the facial recognition instinct. Sometimes

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Speaker 1: we'll see eyes the mouth, for exply in the front

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Speaker 1: of a Masdams five, or people have seen Jesus in

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Speaker 1: a piece of toast. There's another one called which is

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Speaker 1: the fun would just say the gestalt perception. That's the

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Speaker 1: whole I can put a much bigger picture together from

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Speaker 1: missing information. So it's how you can see ls k

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Speaker 1: D and go, oh, that's the fashion label loose kid,

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Speaker 1: all right. That's why brand names can pull vowels out

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Speaker 1: and it doesn't matter there it is, you know, then

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Speaker 1: that's a loose kid right there. Another version of the

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Speaker 1: gestalt perception is looking up at the Southern Cross and

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Speaker 1: seeing this flat shape in the sky, when the reality

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Speaker 1: is that the distance between the closest of those four

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Speaker 1: stars and the furthest of those four stars is two

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Speaker 1: point five quadrillion kilometers. There's fifteen zeros. If you're counting,

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Speaker 1: but we look up at it and go, oh, that's flat.

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Speaker 1: Another one, and I distinctly remember this as a kig

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Speaker 1: is my mum. We you know, Dad moved that when

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Speaker 1: I was young, and so Mum raised us, all four

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Speaker 1: of us, from when I was about eleven, and she

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Speaker 1: worked seven days a week sometimes, so we were in

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Speaker 1: the evening by ourselves quite a bit. Sometimes I'll be

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Speaker 1: there by myself and if I heard a creek in

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Speaker 1: the house, immediately I think it's somebody there. That is

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Speaker 1: called hyperactive agency detection. We're trying to attribute an intention

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Speaker 1: an agency to completely unrelated things or objects or events.

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Speaker 1: For example, oh my computer hates me. If you're getting

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Speaker 1: the spinny beach ball or the blue screen, Oh my

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Speaker 1: computer hates me. Like there's no agency in the computer.

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Speaker 1: It's just some ones and zero is not working, but

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Speaker 1: you're giving it a reason to not like it. It's

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Speaker 1: not there. You may have heard people going, oh, the

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Speaker 1: earthquake happened because we allowed gays in the military. That's

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Speaker 1: why the earthquake happened. No. The other one that's interesting

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Speaker 1: is the illusory pattern perception. Because if there's one thing

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Speaker 1: our brain wants to want, anything else is that it

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Speaker 1: wants to find a story even when no story exists.

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Speaker 1: I use Wolfgang as an example again. The other day,

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Speaker 1: we were playing Snakes and Ladders for the first time.

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Speaker 1: It was really fun and we were playing. I guess

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Speaker 1: we're playing Queensland. So if you roll a six, you

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Speaker 1: get another go. The kid rolls three six's in a row,

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Speaker 1: all right, it was awesome. Now, if the illusory pattern

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Speaker 1: perception was kicking in, I might think, oh, my god,

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Speaker 1: Wolfgang always rolls the six, or to get it weirder,

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Speaker 1: if I was crossing my fingers when he rolled the six.

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Speaker 1: Every time I cross my fingers he rolls a six. Magic,

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Speaker 1: I am magic. Magic is happening in this room. But

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Speaker 1: the fact is there is a one in two hundred

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Speaker 1: and sixteen chance he's going to roll the six three

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Speaker 1: times in a row. Those are pretty good odds because

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Speaker 1: we're warning so much to make everything mean something. My

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Speaker 1: finger crossing is absolutely the reason, not just the quite

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Speaker 1: high statistical probability that you can roll three sixes in

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Speaker 1: a row. It just feels right. There was agency involved.

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Speaker 1: I had something to do with it. And the illusory

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Speaker 1: pattern perception is the one that has people slip down

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Speaker 1: rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and SHD. It's important to

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Speaker 1: know that exists and sometimes statistical anomalies can't look like

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Speaker 1: prayers being answered. But a statistical anomaly won't charge you

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Speaker 1: with tithing or excommunicate you for allowing your wife to

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Speaker 1: make decisions about her own career. This one particularly is

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Speaker 1: not helped when you factor in on top of our

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Speaker 1: own confirmation bias. But what does any of this have

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Speaker 1: to do with being around a loved one with dementia? Right,

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Speaker 1: I'll get to that after the break. Thank you so

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Speaker 1: much for listening to the show today. While Wolfe was

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Speaker 1: finding rabbits by looking up into the clouds, I got

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Speaker 1: to thinking about how our brains are quite interesting, and

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Speaker 1: how they like to make simple to understand stories out

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Speaker 1: of sometimes completely unrelated and incomplete information, just to give

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Speaker 1: us a bit of relief from the discomfort of being

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Speaker 1: uncertain or the discomfort of accepting a reality we don't like.

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Speaker 1: And I was wondering if that had anything to do

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Speaker 1: with how difficult it can be to be around someone

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Speaker 1: that you love who's suffering from dementia. If you're going

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Speaker 1: through that or you've been through that, you know, it's

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Speaker 1: enormously difficult, and the stuff that I've been talking about,

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Speaker 1: after what I've been reading today, it can indeed play

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Speaker 1: a role in the times when people that I have

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Speaker 1: cared about and people that I've known have suffered from dementia.

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Speaker 1: It's really really hard because when we spend time with them,

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Speaker 1: our brain sees this person is very clearly and well,

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Speaker 1: this person we know very very well, quite intimately. This

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Speaker 1: person probably can't walk anymore, probably can't feed themselves. And

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Speaker 1: yet we are flat out trying to match the person

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Speaker 1: we see in front of us with this rich detailed

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Speaker 1: mental model of the person that we have known, sometimes

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Speaker 1: over a lifetime. So when tiny little fragments slivers of

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Speaker 1: familiar behavior that we recognize show up, the way they

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Speaker 1: brush their hair from their face, a particular kind of smile,

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Speaker 1: the sound of a half a chuckle that you recall,

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Speaker 1: our brain tries to fill in the missing piece, is

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Speaker 1: to create the whole that we are familiar with, to

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Speaker 1: make us ah, I am here that they are. And

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Speaker 1: this is also happening while we're searching for signs of

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Speaker 1: that agency that I was talking about. The agency behind

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Speaker 1: the expression is the person with the specific thoughts, the

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Speaker 1: memories that the personality that you've known for a long time,

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Speaker 1: sometimes your whole life, and when glimpses of that show up,

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Speaker 1: something that you relate with agency appears, even for half

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Speaker 1: a second, really powerful. You're going to have that oh

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Speaker 1: my god, they're back, just for a moment. And if

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Speaker 1: it's someone in your family, for example, a parent or

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Speaker 1: a grandparent, well we've got these kind of emotional templates

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Speaker 1: that we have for loved ones. In my experience, I've

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Speaker 1: had just fragments of their pre dementia self flash past

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Speaker 1: and felt that really powerful emotional recognition of oh, there

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Speaker 1: they are, but they often aren't at all there. So

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Speaker 1: when the blank face comes back, it's snapped back into

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Speaker 1: that sadness that we're actually in. And it's really hard

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Speaker 1: because our pattern recognition is working so hard because there's

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Speaker 1: this physical presence, the biggest pattern recognition that is there.

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Speaker 1: They're there, but it's psychologically. They're very different psychologically, sometimes

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Speaker 1: completely absent psychologically, and so while our recognition systems are

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Speaker 1: firing at full speed, trying everything they can to find

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Speaker 1: a story where everything's okay and everything that makes sense,

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Speaker 1: just as we settle on that feeling of oh, there

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Speaker 1: they are, Ah, that's them. There's immediate and incontrovertible evidence

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Speaker 1: that know there they aren't, and it just can go

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Speaker 1: in a cycle that's incredibly challenging. When you are spending

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Speaker 1: time with them. We don't imagine the pieces of Granddad,

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Speaker 1: for example, we don't imagine those little bits that we see.

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Speaker 1: They are real, those bits are there. But then when

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Speaker 1: our brain goes ah granddad mode, we get this drop

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Speaker 1: down menu of feelings and responses and memories that open

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Speaker 1: up in our brain as responses, you know, to deal

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Speaker 1: with when it recognizes the Grandad's here. But none of

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Speaker 1: those apply. None of those apply. We don't get that

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Speaker 1: feeling of this is the person that taught me how

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Speaker 1: to fish, or taught me about who the Bristol Broncos

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Speaker 1: were or whatever. It's really really hard. I don't have

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Speaker 1: any answers here, But reading what I read this afternoon,

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Speaker 1: I know, if anything, that just noticing what's going on,

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Speaker 1: having names for those things. It makes moments like that,

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Speaker 1: like when you're spending time with someone that you love

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Speaker 1: who has dementia, a lot easier to deal with. I've

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Speaker 1: still had to write out the icky feelings that the sadness,

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Speaker 1: the last, the grief. But it's really useful to know

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Speaker 1: about the different ways that our minds can mess with

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Speaker 1: us in an effort just to make us feel like

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Speaker 1: everything makes sense. You know, our brains are trying to

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Speaker 1: do the right thing, but it can really mess up.

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Speaker 1: But if we're aware of it, well, then hopefully when

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Speaker 1: we're kind of a little more centered, we can make

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Speaker 1: better choices. I will tell you where I'm going to start,

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Speaker 1: all right, because I don't have any answers here, but

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Speaker 1: I'm going to start here, and it would be trying

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Speaker 1: to remember that calm wonder that I heard in Wolfe's

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Speaker 1: voice when he said hammer as we're going one hundred

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Speaker 1: and ten down the m for today, his brain told

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Speaker 1: him there is a hammer in the sky, but he

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Speaker 1: was aware that there was not, in fact a hammer

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Speaker 1: in the sky, and just observed how interesting it was

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Speaker 1: that he saw a hammer up there, because if he'd

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Speaker 1: believed it, having seen the cloud myself, that would mean

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Speaker 1: there would have been a hammer the size of a

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Speaker 1: fucking aircraft carrier six hundred meters above us. And I

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Speaker 1: don't think anybody on that highway would have had any

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Speaker 1: calm wonder anywhere near them and would have been terrifying.

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Speaker 1: So I'm just going to try to do my best

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Speaker 1: to notice when those pattern recognitions are throwing up stories

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Speaker 1: or answers that are causing me trouble, and just try

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Speaker 1: to find the that calm wonder of a five year

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Speaker 1: old in between asking if we're there yet. Thank you

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Speaker 1: very much to Adam Buncher, who helped me produce this episode.

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Speaker 1: I'll be back here on Wednesday. Let me know what

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Speaker 1: you saw of the show. You can shoot us an email,

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Speaker 1: send us your email at gmail dot com, or find

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Speaker 1: us on the substack. See you Wednesday,