Rather, Kiper shows the healthy brain is riddled with cognitive biases that impede the work of caring for a person with an impaired mind. One caregiver says, referring to a famous case study by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, it’s “like being an anthropologist on Mars.”īut a caregiver’s slip-up isn’t necessarily the result of character flaws or a lapse in compassion. They traverse warped realities that operate under different rules of time and memory. “It’s not cruelty but desperation that drives us to confront them with the truth.”Ĭaregivers aren’t mere observers to cognitive decline but the “invisible victims” of dementia disorders, Kiper writes. “We want to reestablish a shared reality,” Kiper writes. Often, the spouses, children, and loved ones of people living with dementia succumb to arguing or pleading with their patients, despite reason. This is the focus of Kiper’s “ Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain” - not the mind of the patient, but the caregiver. BOOK REVIEW - “Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain,” by Dasha Kiper (Random House, 272 pages).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |