The Brain and Alzheimer's
Click on a brain part or select a behavior to see how Alzheimer's changes behaviors and abilities.

Normal: Not being able to think of a specific descriptive word.
Not Normal: Forgetting simple nouns, like " toothbrush" or "hammer""

Temporal Lobe: Tongue-Tied
The temporal lobe plays a key role in memory, language and high-level sensory processing, like understanding speech. Early in the disease, problems in the temporal lobe start to cause aphasia, the inability to remember or recall words. Naming things becomes particularly difficult, to the point where, eventually, the speech of someone with Alzheimer's becomes devoid of specific nouns. In the middle and later stages, problems in the temporal lobe might also cause some patients to experience auditory and visual hallucinations.

Normal: Becoming upset when your spouse forgets your birthday..
Not Normal: Yelling at your granddaughter when she ties her shoe incorrectly.

Amygdala: Moody
The amygdala regulates basic emotions such as fear, anger and craving and is affected quite early in Alzheimer's. Once Alzheimer's disrupts the brain's emotional center, a person may display surprising behaviors such as apathy, paranoia, emotional outbursts and inappropriate sexual advances. Unprovoked hostility and anxiousness might appear completely out-of-the-blue.

Normal: Getting up earlier than you used to.
Not Normal: Asking for a ride to the grocery store at 2 a.m.

Brain Stem: Sleep-Disturbed
Early In Alzheimer's disease, changes to the brain stem begin disrupting sleep patterns. Very late in the disease, the brain stem's deterioration can also affect vital processes like breathing, blinking, blood pressure and heart rate. However, other complications usually intervene before this happens. For instance, difficulties swallowing often make someone vulnerable to pneumonia before the brain stem truly degenerates.

Normal: Refusing to try a new restaurant.
Not Normal: Refusing to return a borrowed item, insisting that it's yours.

Frontal Lobe: Irrational
The frontal lobe helps carry out purposeful behaviors and complex reasoning. When Alzheimer's strikes the frontal lobe, victims lose the ability to plan and initiate complicated activities like balancing a checkbook. That's why it becomes important to break processes into simple steps. This loss of processing skills makes reasoning with people who have Alzheimer's virtually impossible. People with Alzheimer's are not being stubborn; their brains just aren't healthy enough to carry out the complex processes that logic demands.

Frontal dysfunction (combined with amygdala problems) also leads to a loss of inhibition, which may cause behaviors such as undressing in public, swearing and making inappropriate statements.

Normal: Mixing up the names of two movies you recently saw.
Not Normal: Trying to purchase a $20 item with a one dollar bill.

Parietal Lobe: Disoriented
The parietal lobe helps us orient our bodies in space and decipher where and what things are. When Alzheimer's begins destroying the parietal lobe, victims become lost and disoriented, even in familiar settings. They also begin mixing up objects, thinking that a computer is a television or that a mixing bowl is a soup pot.

Normal: Forgetting your ATM number or where you parked your car.
Not Normal: Forgetting what an ATM card is or what kind of car you own.

Hippocampus: Forgetful
The hippocampus takes our immediate thoughts and impressions and turns them into memories. Alzheimer's attacks the hippocampus first, so short-term memory is the first thing to fail. Eventually, new memories become impossible to make and learning is a thing of the past. Without knowing what just happened, it's difficult for people to judge things like time, place and what's going on around them. This confusion can accentuate the paranoia caused by an Alzheimer's-stricken amygdala.

Normal: Forgetting the name of an old classmate.
Not Normal: Not recognizing a recent picture of yourself.

Occipital Lobe: Can't recognize people/objects
The occipital lobe is primarily responsible for visual interpretation, most of which is spared during Alzheimer's. However, some visual association areas are affected, making it difficult to process subtle visual cues. People's faces are one example of a visual cue that becomes difficult to recognize, probably because age and emotion cause facial expressions to change constantly, requiring a lot of interpretation.