Opinion: What a doctor sees when Joe Biden hesitates

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

As a geriatrician, I discuss the effects of aging with patients every day. I wish I had a chance to give my usual talk to everyone who chortles or tears their hair out about President Biden’s fitness for his job.

First, memory. I explain to patients that there are three components to consider. One is formation. Then storage. And finally, recall. The most common issue among seniors is slow recall. This is the familiar “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, when a word seems to hide or a name won’t come to mind. You know the name, it’s in your bank of memories, it just can’t be accessed quickly. Given time, it usually arrives. This problem, called age-associated memory impairment, often starts for people in their 30s and gradually progresses. It’s a nuisance but not disabling. If, like me, you find yourself using the term “whatchamacallit,” you probably have it. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, is a different story. Those affected lose the ability to store new memories. They can still access old memories in their memory bank and may recount events that occurred decades ago. But they can’t tell you what they had for breakfast because that never entered the memory bank. (I reassure my patients with age-associated memory impairment by asking whether they remember their breakfast. They do.)

-snip-

Fortunately, President Biden shows no signs of Alzheimer’s disease. At news conferences, he references new events and obviously creates new memories efficiently. He speaks slowly and pauses to find words like others with benign age-associated memory impairment. These issues are exacerbated by a chronic speech impediment. Biden has struggled with stuttering since childhood, and remnants of the condition have long been apparent in his speech.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/opinion-what-a-doctor-sees-when-joe-biden-hesitates/ar-BB1jtR5j?ocid=nl_article_link

[AllaN01Bear]

1. i am getting tired of this sleepy joe thing .

ps i use whatchamacallit,thingamagig and whoseits all the time and have done so since i was a child. i also use the word dohickey too also. so there too.

[JT45242]

2. Plus the stutter...

I had a lot of students who would carefully construct sentences in their head to minimize the risk of stuttering.

I see that more than searching for words.

[Mr.Bill]

10. I stuttered since I was a child.

My coping mechanism was to expand my vocabulary so I could substitute synonyms to dodge the stutter. At age 70, I still do it sometimes, usually when a synonym is not available, such as someone's name. By the time I graduated from high school, I had the problem about 95% beaten, with the added benefit of my expanded vocabulary which made me the spelling bee champion in elementary school, and a finalist in the running for outstanding English student of the year when I was a Senior. I was also editor of my high school newspaper in my Junior year.

Participating in websites like this one keeps my writing and speech pretty sharp. I've lost a step here and there, but I think I still do okay.

[birdographer]

16. Exactly what I have been saying

When Biden was on Seth Meyers recently, and therefore talking off the cuff and not from a teleprompter or speech he had read a few times, the slightly slow speech looked to me exactly like someone who was having to run the words through some sort of filter before saying them (well, and there's also his profanity filter 😄!). He just looked like he was taking a moment to pick the word he was going to use so as not to have any stumbling over it. Neither the hesitation nor the words he was saying seemed "old person" to me.

He certainly wasn't going bing, bong, boom or dissolving into gibberish followed by "ohhhhhhhhh" like we are seeing with TSF.

[Mister Ed]

3. Slow recall can be a peculiarly pinpointed sort of thing.

A couple of months ago, at age 66, I had a very odd slow-memory incident, in which I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the famous actress who played Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz."

Now, everybody knows that name, and I'm sure you're shouting it as you read. But I could not remember it.

I remembered plenty of other things about her. I recalled that she had been born Frances Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and that her family had moved from there when she was four years old. But I could not remember her name.

I could rattle off the names of all of her principal cast-mates in "The Wizard of Oz": Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Margaret Hamilton, Frank Morgan, Billie Burke. But I could not remember her name, and I was determined not to go and look it up.

I recalled that she starred in many other films, such as "Meet Me In St, Louis", and that she appeared in a number of movies with Mickey Rooney. But I couldn't remember her name.

I knew that her two daughters were Lorna Luft and Liza Minelli, and that she had died in the summertime when I was about twelve years old. But for about ninety minutes I couldn't remember her name.

Of course, the clouds eventually parted, and I softly said, "Judy Garland".

That's quite a peculiar lapse of memory, but given the wealth of associated knowledge that I was able to tap into, I don't think it means that I'm ready to be institutionalized or that I shouldn't operate heavy machinery. And it's the same with Joe Biden. If he's occasionally slow to pull a certain detail from memory, then it certainly doesn't negate the fact that he's probably the most effective president we've had in decades.

[lastlib]

7. Awhile back, I had a discussion with someone, and told him....

...that I could recite the Gettysburg Address, the poem The Raven, and Hamlet's soliloquy from memory, but couldn't remember the cost of my gas-tank fill-up that morning. Don't think of putting me out to pasture for that lapse.

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

8. Happens to me all the time. Frustrating.

[Delmette2.0]

15. I started "losing words" about 10 years ago.

I am now 71 and I can describe the word I am searching for or the event our movie. This is why I don't tell jokes any more...I screw up the punch line.

[shrike3]

20. Happens to me, too. My sympathies.

[SarahD]

4. Media talking heads have no room to criticize.

"Yes, Jane. The situation in Gaza is described as... um... dire. Food aid has been... um... slow to arrive due to certain... um... factors like... um... slowness. Back to you, Jane."

[Wild blueberry]

5. Thank you

[maxsolomon]

6. You know who spoke slowly? OBAMA.

It used to drive me a bit nuts because I knew how eloquent he could be, but when speaking extemporaneously, he was s l o w and deliberate. Presidents should be; they need to triangulate everything they say because it is important.

When I watch Biden the main thing I see that worries me is that he mangles words - smushes them, slurs them, however you want to put it.

I wish he'd slow down even more to enunciate more. I know the stutter plays a role, but the slurring is what his critics seize on.

[PatSeg]

18. Oh yes, that drove me nuts as well

I do understand why they do it though. When you're President, anything you say is forever, so they are very careful with their words. Obama was so different when he was being informal and funny. It was like two very different people

As for Biden, he knows he is prone to gaffes. I think that and his stutter makes him super careful especially now that he is President.

As I get older, I find myself making a lot of mistakes and it is harder to recall a lot of details. It is all fine inside my head, it just doesn't always come out of my mouth the same way.

[patphil]

9. Being 77 years of age, I can say without a doubt that President Biden is far better than his age.

He may slow down a bit more, but I'm sure he'll be able to do a good job as president for the next 5 years; better than most.
I'm all in for Joe!

[calimary]

21. Seventy and full-on for Biden!

My husband is slightly older, firmly pro-Biden as well.

It does make for a pleasant life. Yeah, sometimes we argue, but it’s never about politics.

I don’t think I could have married a Republican in the first place.

[usaf-vet]

11. I had an older cousin who stuttered. I remember those pauses when he spoke. I ask him about it (we were close) and....

.....here is what he told me. Often, he paused to seek out an alternative word to avoid the word "at the tip of his tongue," which he knew was hard for him to say, like rather than w...w...woman, he might say lady.

He was brilliant and had a college degree. He served four years in the Army in Germany.

After his discharge, he got an entry-level job in the financial department of a nationally well-known business in the mid-to-late 1950s.

He never lost his stutter, but he worked his way up in the company and retired as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

I have avoided naming the company because it is so well known; millions of us know it and use its products.

[Bev54]

12. Exactly, I too had someone in my life who stuttered and they too would search for an alternative word

[OverBurn]

13. I'd rather have a cardboard cutout of Biden, than the orange degenerate filth, but of course I'm reasonable.

[Farmer-Rick]

14. As you get older you get more and more memories

Younger people can spit out things quickly because they have less stored memories to sort through.

Though some folks seem to be able to access a lot of memory without slowing down. But that's not the average person.

It's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

[Emrys]

17. A doctor's opinion that's well worth taking note of.

Never mind from my 30s, I think I've had that tip-of-the-tongue syndrome pretty much all my life. I still in general have a remarkable memory for things that matter, and couldn't have held down my job as an editor without it. Practice and revisiting memories seems to be an important factor - I can sometimes embarrassingly forget friends' or friends' spouses' names if I haven't seen or thought about them for a while, and that doesn't mean I don't love them. I'm just crap with names.

Add in the stress and multiple complicated considerations that Biden has on his mind whenever he's speaking in public, and it's not necessary to also factor in dealing with a stammer to make some allowances and cut him slack.

Now, with Trump - whose grasp on reality and what most of us would consider the truth is tenuous at best and who tends go off on wild or humdrum fugues with increasing regularity and vividness or inanity - I think there are different problems at play, and if I was close to him (heaven forbid), I'd be on edge every time he had to interact with anyone, not just a crowd.

And yes, someone mentioned Obama above - I well remember social media trolls yukking it up about his umms and occasional misspeaks when he was in office. It's just part of the gig.

[ShazzieB]

19. I know that "tip of the tongue" phenomenon well.

Happens to me frequently, and it often involves the name of someONE or someTHING. For example, the other day I got stuck on the name of a particular bird, a type of crane to be exact. I could picture that bird clearly. I knew it had buff-colored feathers and a patch of red on its head. I knew the name would come to me eventually, but I didn't feel like waiting, so I googled "cranes," hoping to find a list of common crane species. I knew that if I saw the name in print, I'd recognize it.

When my search results came up, they included a row of photos of cranes across the top of the screen, one of which was was the bird I was looking for. As soon as I saw that picture, the name of the bird popped into my head: sandhill crane. It was there in my memory all along, and I didn't even need to pick its name out of a list. The image triggered my memory sufficiently to pull it up.

This kind of thing doesn't happen to me constantly, just often enough to be slightly annoying. When it does happen, it doesn't worry me, because I know I haven't forgotten the information I'm trying to recall. It's in there somewhere, mixed in with all the other clutter in my brain, and it will come floating to the surface if I just give it time (or find some way to jog it loose, as with the sandhill crane).

I like to think of my brain as an overstuffed filing cabinet or a bookshelf that's so overflowing with books that it's hard to locate a particular one. As we get older, our brains get filled with more and more information, from random facts to detailed memories. I feel like mine is stuffed to the gills already, and yet I keep learning more and more every day. I don't find it at all odd that retrieving a particular piece of information takes me a while sometimes, and it stands to reason that the same thing would happen to Joe Biden, who is several years older than I am.

[Uncle Joe]

22. Kicked and recommended

Thanks for the thread Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin