..............For decades, studies have found that deterioration in the fluency, complexity, and vocabulary level of spontaneous speech can indicate slipping brain function due to normal aging or neurodegenerative disease. STAT and the experts therefore considered only unscripted utterances, not planned speeches and statements, since only the former tap the neural networks that offer a window into brain function.
The experts noted clear changes from Trump’s unscripted answers 30 years ago to those in 2017, in some cases stark enough to raise questions about his brain health. They noted, however, that the same sort of linguistic decline can also reflect stress, frustration, anger, or just plain fatigue.
Ben Michaelis, a psychologist in New York City, performed cognitive assessments at the behest of the New York Supreme Court and criminal courts and taught the technique at a hospital and university. “There are clearly some changes in Trump as a speaker” since the 1980s, said Michaelis, who does not support Trump, including a “clear reduction in linguistic sophistication over time,” with “simpler word choices and sentence structure. … In fairness to Trump, he’s 70, so some decline in his cognitive functioning over time would be expected.”
Some sentences, or partial sentences, would, if written, make a second-grade teacher despair. “We’ll do some questions, unless you have enough questions,” Trump told a February press conference. And last week, he told NBC’s Lester Holt, “When I did this now I said, I probably, maybe will confuse people, maybe I’ll expand that, you know, lengthen the time because it should be over with, in my opinion, should have been over with a long time ago.”..........................
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