A novelist's 'signs of dementia' appeared in his novels long before he was diagnosed, according to a study
Detecting Dementia Using Lexical Analysis: Terry Pratchett's Discworld Tells a More Personal Story | MDPI
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/16/1/94
Terry Pratchett's novels may have held clues to his dementia a decade before diagnosis, our new study suggests
https://theconversation.com/terry-pratchetts-novels-may-have-held-clues-to-his-dementia-a-decade-before-diagnosis-our-new-study-suggests-273777
Dementia is commonly described as 'memory problems,' but this is only one aspect of the broader cognitive decline that dementia causes. In the early stages of dementia, before memory problems become noticeable, attention, perception, and language skills are often affected, but these are often attributed to other causes such as stress and aging.
A research team led by Thomas Wilcockson, a senior lecturer in psychology at Loughborough University in the UK, wondered if early symptoms of dementia could be seen in the writing of novelists who later developed dementia.
'Language offers a unique window into cognitive change,' Wilcockson and colleagues write. 'The words we choose, the diversity of our vocabulary, and the way we construct descriptions are closely linked to brain function. Even small changes in language use may reflect underlying neurological changes.'
The research team focused on the renowned British author Terry Pratchett. Beloved for his humorous science fiction and fantasy novels, Pratchett was one of Britain's best-selling authors in the 1990s and sold 55 million copies worldwide in 2007. After announcing that he had Alzheimer's disease in 2007, Pratchett devoted himself to dementia research and awareness activities until his death in 2015 from an infectious disease.
by Wikimedia Commons
The study used 33 works from Pratchett's 'Discworld' series, focusing on the vocabulary used in the works and tokenizing and analyzing the diversity of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
They found that in works written by Pratchett from middle age onward, the variety of nouns and adjectives used significantly decreased with age. 'Throughout Pratchett's later novels, there was a clear and statistically significant decline in the variety of adjectives he used, a gradual narrowing of the richness of his descriptive language. This was not necessarily noticeable to readers, nor did it represent a sudden decline in quality. Rather, it was a subtle, gradual change that could only be detected through detailed linguistic analysis,' Thomas and his colleagues wrote.
What's particularly significant is that the researchers note that the first significant decline in vocabulary was seen in
The graph below shows the vocabulary diversity in Pratchett's works, with the vertical axis representing vocabulary diversity and the horizontal axis representing Pratchett's age. Each line represents adjectives (red), adverbs (green), nouns (blue), and verbs (purple), and we can see that the diversity of adjectives and nouns gradually decreases.
These findings suggest that analyzing text data left behind by people may be a way to detect early signs of dementia. 'Importantly, linguistic data already exists. People create vast amounts of documents through emails, reports, messages, and online communications,' Thomas and colleagues wrote. 'With appropriate privacy and consent protections, subtle changes in writing style may help detect early cognitive decline, long before it impacts daily functioning.'
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