Donald Trump and dementia

[Girard442]

A lot of people, some in jest, some seriously, have suggested that Donald Trump is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's. I have a suggestion: what if we all look for incidents that would show that Trump is capable of acts of concentration, recall, reasoning, and self-restraint that would be inconsistent with dementia.

Suppose we'll see any?

[Vinca]

1. We just saw one yesterday.

On Wednesday he said the recent terror attacks were an attack on Christianity. On Thursday he say "humanity" and denied ever making the first statement. The trick is deciding what is pathological lying and what is dementia.

[Girard442]

2. Confabulation

In the later stages of dementia, a person gets details mixed up and sometimes fabricates things from fragmented memories. In the field of Psychiatry there is a name for this mental process called "confabulation", which is defined as: Filling in memory gaps with a falsification that a person believes to be true. The dementia afflicted person absolutely believes without question, that this memory is complete and intact. Sometimes these "memories" are plausible explanations that sound reasonable and other times, they are absolutely preposterous. Because the belief in these is absolute, it makes no difference that they are illogical, impractical, or even impossible.

http://www.healthcentral.com/alzheimers/c/254281/103267/confabulation/