The literature of neurology is rich and varied, yet it is almost always concerned with understanding. It's concerned with the quest for understanding, hard-earned and often incomplete, and with the value of understanding, and the fundamental differences it can make. This is not surprising. Right near the top of the list of needs, I would argue, a neurology patient needs to be understood - by doctors and nurses, and by the bureaucracy of social care and welfare. Also, a neurology patient often needs to be understood by strangers, the people encountered in shops and when boarding buses. And by family. All patients want to be understood - we all want to be understood in sickness and in health. But neurology is often a buried landscape, strange things fizzing and flickering in the shadows. It is filled with private symptoms and internal events that require interpretation. Too many aspects cannot be easily shared.
A case in point: in 2015, dementia overtook heart disease and stroke as the UK's biggest cause of death. It looms large in our world, and yet I have sometimes wondered if I genuinely understand what it is at all. And then: for an hour last week - a vital, strangely thrilling hour - I got a bit closer to a basic comprehension. All thanks to the literature of neurology - in this case a video game.
Dementia is the broad term for a constellation of different conditions affecting the brain. Commonly, it's shorthand for that illness where you sometimes forget your keys, what you did with the mail, what your own face looks like, what your children are called and who they are. But it's also more than that, if that is possible. More than forgetting, dementia can be a panoramic and degenerative experience that involves everything from hallucinations to periods of clarity. When the brain is attacked, and I am paraphrasing the neurologist Dr Allan Ropper here, you have to understand this one thing - the person is in the brain.