Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue:

> In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with him in 1992 about graduate school programs and what problems I might pursue. And I remember being just amazed how he could cut to the core of the questions I was thinking about, I was like, ‘Wow, even in his compromised state he still has that ability.’”

So in 1992, an actual meaningful conversation with him seemed to be unexpected, and after 9 years of "quickly progressing" Alzheimer's, I would expect him to be in really terribly shape and barely coherent. Yet there is an article about him from 1992 [1], which shows him at age 75, in good shape, still able to juggle and to hold a conversation about his achievements and about information theory:

> “My first thinking about [information theory]," Shannon said, “was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy channel. This was a specific problem, where you're thinking about a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about all these broader applications."

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-w...

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-...

Those examples are ones that can happen without knowing where you are, or who exactly you are currently talking to. Dementia can take that away, as well; but often people notice people with dementia not engaging directly and specifically with them in the now.

As an example, my grandparents would often think I was my father when I would visit them. If I tried to get them to talk to me, as me, expect confusion and nothing to make sense. Let them just talk, though, and what they were saying would make sense. Especially once I realized they were largely taking up a context I just wasn't in.

My grandfather had Alzheimer's. I visited him in the nursing home. He mistook me for his late brother, and presumed that we were about to go on a trip, that he had already taken decades ago, to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I didn't know what to do so I just played along with it. We spent the next hour having the most in depth and amazing conversation about the history of hist Baseball experiences from his youth. He remembered nearly everything from that period of his life and we discussed it in exceptional detail.

I walked away both elated that we could have that moment and incredibly sad that most victims of this disease seem entirely trapped within it. They're still in there. They're still that same person.

I wonder, is it possible that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s could be partially masked by being good-natured and very intelligent? Like maybe Alzheimer’s would sort of… drop him into conversations without context, but then he’d work out the context and try to give advice anyway?

Sounds like a good-natured genius's way to handle that kind of scenario to me, FWIW

Brief moments of clarity is pretty common in people with Alzheimer's. Having worked with elder care, there were lots of moments where people who usually didn't speak at all and were mostly confused, suddenly started having conversations and seeming to understand where they were, and then some hours later, being back in the state of utter confusion.

Doesn't surprise me that some of our greater minds of our time would have a similar experience, but with a even stronger contrast.

If he was diagnosed in 1983 and lived until 2001, then he is in the 99th percentile in terms of years of life after diagnosis. To say that his illness progressed "very quickly" is probably just incorrect, relatively speaking.

Well, my grandmother had dementia.

Her illness progressed very quickly in the sense that it only took her about a year for her to regress into an infant mentally. She spent about 10 - 13 years in bed screaming like a child.

My point being that dementia can progress quickly, but you can still live with it for a long time (if you are unlucky enough). We, as in her family, spent years hoping she would die, while she spent years suffering.

Average life expectancy for someone with Alzheimer's is 5.8 years [0], so Shannon's couldn't really have been quickly progressing unless he was diagnosed extremely early.

I remember when my mom got it, I did a bunch of research and figured out that she probably only had about 3 more years of okayish memory and a decent quality of life, and then maybe 5 more years after that until death. That stuff depends on age and gender, and my mom was young so I think those numbers are even shorter for someone who is old and male like Shannon. There is of course plenty of variability and some people live decades with it.

So yeah, doesn't sound like "very quick" progression. But if your baseline is a healthy adult aging normally, it would still seem very quick compared to that, I guess.

[0] https://www.healthline.com/health/alzheimers/life-expectancy

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