An elderly woman suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease had neither talked to nor reacted to any of her family members for years. Then, one day, she suddenly started chatting with her granddaughter, asking for news of other family members and even giving her granddaughter advice. “It was like talking to Rip van Winkle,” the granddaughter told University of Virginia researchers of her astonishment. Unfortunately, the reawakening did not last—the grandmother died the next week.
That event got written up as what the case study authors called terminal lucidity—a surprising, coherent episode of meaningful communication just before death in someone presumed incapable of social interaction. Yet it was by no means unique. Physician Basil Eldadah, who heads the geriatric branch at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), had heard such stories and filed them away as intriguing accounts. But in 2018, spurred by the need to make progress combatting Alzheimer’s, Eldadah began to think it was time to do more and organized a workshop for interested scientists. After all, if the grandmother was able to tap into mysterious neural reserves, cases such as hers might help scientists explore how cognition could possibly be restored—even briefly—in patients with the most advanced neurodegenerative disease.
This summer Eldadah and the scientists he assembled have taken the first steps toward systematic and rigorous study of what they are now calling paradoxical lucidity, a broader label intended to capture the dramatic, unexpected and puzzling nature of the phenomenon.
[...] No one can say yet precisely what paradoxical lucidity is. Based on the limited case reports and anecdotes, it seems to be a spontaneous, meaningful event that goes well beyond the occasional “good days” most dementia patients experience. The period of clarity is brief, lasting minutes, hours or possibly a day. It seems to come in the hours, days or weeks before death. Even though it hasn’t had a label until now, many people recognize the signs. “I start describing it and you start to see heads nodding,” Eldadah says. “People say, ‘oh yes, I’ve seen that.’ It’s happened so many times that we’re reassured that there is something there. Our job is to figure out what that it is.” Whatever it is, Eldadah suspects, “it happens more often than we think.” Caregivers might not be reporting what they see, he says, and medications could mask its presence.
Episodes of paradoxical lucidity have also been seen in patients with stroke, brain tumors and other conditions. But the impetus for studying the phenomenon now is because of the rising sense of urgency about Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias after years of unsuccessful efforts to develop any meaningful treatment as well as the faint glimmer of hope that paradoxical lucidity offers the possibility that dementia may not, in fact, be entirely irreversible. “It seemed like this would be an opportune time to do something innovative and to push the envelope,” Eldadah says. “It’s gratifying to get in on the ground floor of an area of science.”
[...] For now, everything about paradoxical lucidity is speculative, but even with long odds, the possibility of useful findings is exciting, Eldadah says. “This may end up going nowhere, but it’s a stone that we have to turn.”
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @08:32PM
They just poison Trump's breakfast every morning to get him lucid, then they slow drip the antidote throughout they day. By his 5AM twitter-shit he's back to crazyville.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 04 2019, @08:35PM (2 children)
Pretty well-known, experienced this same thing with Gramps. This was in his EOL stage when he was doing nothing but sleeping all day. In a rare moment, we had one last chat where he was lucid, sitting upright and chatty, did some catching up, etc. Then out of nowhere he told me that he had a car battery charger in the garage, started going into great detail about the make and model of the battery charger, then told me that he planned to charge his battery after I left (his car was pretty new and its battery didn't need a charge). I took that as my cue to wrap things up, as I was losing him.
He died a week later.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday August 04 2019, @09:28PM (1 child)
Four days before my mum's death from lung cancer, she did something similar. She was on some pretty strong morphine, never wanted to do anything or talk. Then one day in hospital she perked up and had a real nice convo with dad about the old days. Next day she was basically comatose due to the morphine, died two days later.
Saw this story and thought, Yep same thing...
It's an eerie thing, like they know it's coming soon so they basically get the energy to say goodbye in a subtle way.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 04 2019, @10:07PM
And as the summary described, it's because all of that information is left intact and stored internally. The problem is that people have to die so that the rest can live, since we are all operating within limited resources. You see this behavior often in nature, for example, wolf societies in which the elderly detach themselves from the society and wander off to disappear. Crows even have funerals.
All of the accomplishments, all of the long-term memory, are stored and kept on a mostly permanent basis. Only problem is, mammal scum even with their advanced brains realize their day to shut down is nigh. And this is why we hate Jew fucks like Bezos and Epstein: They and those like them are the only motherfuckers who desperately try to cheat death. They believe that they can live immortally in nature.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 04 2019, @08:49PM (6 children)
It's not so much that the "backup copies" have been brought online, they've been there all the time - living, remembering, but unable to hook up with the I/O mechanisms.
We work with kids with Autism, and we see episodes of verbal lucidity associated with fevers and other transient events in them.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @10:01PM (2 children)
Were these fevers brought on by vaccines?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @10:09PM
No, these are more closely associated with chemtrails.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @10:16PM
Don't be ridiculous. They caught the autism from a vaccine. The fevers were because they didn't get any other vaccines after the autism incident.
I'm sure I had a touch of autism one time after a vaccine. Cleared up after a couple of days though. Dodged a bullet right there I tell you.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Sunday August 04 2019, @10:58PM (2 children)
I would be interested to know how much knowledge/memory these people have of their time suffering with Alzheimer's. In those sudden moments of lucidity how much do they recall. The brain appears to block from you noticing your own decline, I imagine because it would break people to see how far they have fallen. I have pondered about why people with dementia/alzheimers tend to become angry/violent. With my grandmother she seemed to get overly angry when her thoughts had to either face the facts of mental decline (leaving stove on, heater, etc) and would lash out rather than accept the facts. While I am sure there will be fondness thinking of those who took care of you (for those whose family actually did), but I think remembering the time a person was suffering heavily from the disease would do more harm than good. People don't like being a burden, they don't like seeing themselves out of character, the diapers, the anger, the bad treatment by bad caretakers, etc.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 04 2019, @11:17PM (1 child)
Just like having children, if you could clearly remember what the first year after birth was like, you'd never have sex again.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by Mykl on Monday August 05 2019, @12:32AM
As I was wheeling my wife into the delivery room for baby #2, she turned and said to me "Oh shit, now I remember how bad this is!"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 05 2019, @12:16AM (1 child)
I hope that if I turn demented, I'll have an early episode of lucidity long enough to set up my suicide.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday August 05 2019, @02:26PM
I'll settle for a last episode of not writing Java.
Or if I become (even more?) demented, I'll stop writing Java. Then have one final episode of writing more Java?
But don't blame Java. The end of the world will be traced back to the Mars company introducing the blue M&M.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 05 2019, @01:53AM (1 child)
More or less related,
I have some family story where a great uncle or something said to his close family "I have an appointment today", so after eating, he dressed up and went to bed. And later he died.
More recently my 16yo old cat went outside and didn't come home for a few days, I found him back in a corner outside still alive and grumpy. And then one week after he didn't came back, he was walking around wanting to be pet more than usual and died during the night.
It's pretty esoteric, but I think there's definitely something with various lifeforms sensing more.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday August 05 2019, @03:32AM
In your cat's case, there'd be no supernatural element. Cats and dogs are a lot like little kids: when they don't feel well, they'll become irritable and/or clingy, which is the closest they can come to asking us to help them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday August 05 2019, @06:56AM
This is a pretty well-known phenomenon. Maybe not such extreme examples, but dementia patients can "pull themselves together". An anecdote:
The family on my mother's side revolved around my grandmother. Every Christmas during my childhood, there would be a huge family gathering at my grandmother's house. When my generation grew up and had kids, we still kept this tradition going, just not every year, as long as my grandmother lived in her house. Eventually - due to dementia - she couldn't live independently any longer, so she went into a nursing home.
In the nursing home, her dementia gradually worsened. She was a classic case of "living in the past". She thought her granddaughters were her daughters (because her daughters surely weren't those women with the gray hair). She didn't remember anything at all from one day to the next. Eventually, she didn't really recognize anyone - you had to introduce yourself each time, and she was polite enough to pretend she had some clue who your were, but...not really.
So...came her 100th birthday, and we decided to rent a small conference center in a hotel and have one, last huge family gathering.With all the grandchildren, who by now were mostly married with their own kids, there were over 100 of us. My grandmother was regularly informed that this was going to happen, and - although she didn't seem to remember - it must have made some impression at some level. When the big evening came, she was totally with it the entire, long evening. She knew who everyone was, and chatted with us almost like old times. It was important to her, and I suppose it took a huge internal effort, but she put her dementia aside for the evening. The next day, she was back in the fog. Not unexpected, and we all keep very fond memories of that one, last gathering.
As far as TFA goes: We weren't surprised that this worked. It's common knowledge that dementia patients can pull themselves together for important events, and we fully expected my grandmother to do so, to at least some extent. Perhaps we were surprised at how well it worked: it was a great celebration, and also farewell party for a life well-lived.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday August 05 2019, @06:58PM
In many dying trajectories there can also be a last-ditch period of physical energy or display of atypical strength (as in constitution/endurance) that lasts for a relatively short period of time. It can be hours, days, or weeks before death, and is generally associated with what is known as a frailty trajectory [biomedcentral.com]. It is like the body concentrates bursts of energies, akin to a rocket engine firing its remaining fuel at full thrust until the engine can only start guttering, before the body starts initiating final shutdown procedures.
I don't think it's solely related to Alzheimer's - I thought many different dementia-spectrum disorders can have similar processes to those described. It is good to bring what's known into the light, though, and that further research occurs on it.
That said, sometimes people do not get either a physical or mental boost but do simply fade away, or abruptly die, or have other trajectories of dying.
This sig for rent.