It’s debatable whether your can spot mental illness from your friend’s depressing Live Journal posts or your girlfriend’s hot and cold text messages, but Ian Lancashire, an English Professor at the University of Toronto believes that it may be possible to detect Alzheimer’s by analyzing the way in which a person’s writing changes over time. He does this by making concordances or alphabetical lists of all the words used and the contexts in which they appear in a body of work. He’s studied many of the great English writers, Shakespeare, Milton (who never used the word ‘because’), and Chaucer, but in the mid 90’s, he decided to turn his attention to a less esteemed writer, but certainly a no less prolific one – Agatha Christie.
Lancashire amassed 16 of Christie's novels, written over a more than fifty year span and fed the text into a computer program. The program computed the numbers of words she used as well as the frequency in which they appeared. When looking at the data for her 73rd novel (written when she was 81 years old), Lancashire made an interesting discovery. Her use of nonspecific words, such as ‘thing,’ ‘anything’, ‘something’, and ‘nothing,’ spiked. At the same time, her overall vocabulary dropped by 20%. One fifth of her original vocabulary was simply no longer in use. After two years of running the data by statisticians, linguists and pathologists, Lancashire concluded that the data supported the view that by the writing of her 73rd novel, Christie had developed Alzheimer’s.
It’s a hard theory to test because Christie was never officially diagnosed. In fact, don’t writing styles change over time? Isn’t it possible that her editors and publisher wanted a simpler more accessible text to attract a younger demographic? We’ll never actually know, but there is a lot of good evidence to support the Alzheimer’s view. Christie often complained of an inability to concentrate in her later years, and friends reported that she would have fits of anger (an almost telltale sign of the disease) and that she sometimes wouldn’t make sense in conversation.
This isn’t the first time that linguistic research has been used to speculate about Alzheimer’s. In 2004 Peter Garrard, a cognitive scientist at University College London, found similar changes in the last book by British author Iris Murdoch. Shortly before his study was published, Murdoch was diagnosed.
In the “Nun Study” of 1990, David Snowdon of the University of Minnesota looked at the biographies of 678 nuns, all over the age of 75 that were written upon entering the order, when they were, on average, age 22. His team evaluated the essays based on grammatical complexity and idea density – the average number of discrete ideas contained in every 10 written words. What he found was that sisters who scored poorly on those two measures were much more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Sisters within the lower third of the sample with respect to idea density were 60 times more likely to develop the disease than a sister in the upper third. In fact, using the essays, the researchers could predict with 92% accuracy whether the brain of a particular sister, investigated after her death, had been damaged by Alzheimer’s. What this is suggesting is that a writing taken in your early twenties may be able to predict what could happen to you fifty years later. But we don’t know exactly how. Do sentences with simpler ideas mean that a person, even in their early 20’s already has a less healthy brain than someone who uses rich sentences? Or does this mean that people who create idea dense sentences are stronger readers and writers and that this is what keeps the brain fit and healthy?
The cruel predicament that those who have Alzheimer’s are in is that as the brain deteriorates, one is left with just enough wherewithal to understand that something is being lost. It may sound silly, but I just turned 25 last month, and I seem to remember in earlier years having a much richer vocabulary, and I even remember typing nonstop for pages and never once making a mistake, where as now when I type this, I don’t go so much as a paragraph without struggling to find a more descriptive word, or going back to fix something underlined in orange. As a young, healthy woman, I can only begin to imagine the hell someone must go through when their brain is actually in physical decay.
In Christie’s 73rd novel, Elephants Can Remember the main character is a female novelist who is struggling with memory loss as she tries to help Hercule Poirot solve a long forgotten crime. Perhaps Christie needed to pen it to come to terms with what was happening in her internal world. When Lancashire read the book, he couldn’t help but see the tragic irony of the tale and imagine Christie fighting the terrain of her own mind. Of her continuing to write, he says, it “struck me as heroic."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127211884
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