At the height of his delectonic apocalypse, 14 people were spent to bind José Arcadio Buendía and dragged 20 people to the chestnut tree. The patriarch of Gabriel García Márquez One hundred years of loneliness Until his death, he would be bound there, "polluted by sunlight and rain", and he sank into the "uninformed abyss".

Decades after the publication of the classic Colombian novel, Francisco Piedrahita encountered a similar scene when growing up in the country's mountainous areas. He walked through the canoe village of his hometown and glimpsed his neighbor who seemed disoriented or could not leave his bed. Once, he saw a man tied a rope to furniture. "This is a disease that people suffer from and one day you will start to understand," Piedrahita's mother explained.

She is right. Piedrahita watched his grandmother die. Other grandparents, aunts and uncles followed closely behind. Piedrahita eventually became a neurological nurse, caring for families, including their own, and their mark is a rare genetic mutation associated with early onset of Alzheimer's disease.

His story - part of clinical, part of family - forms the core of Forgotten valleyJennie Erin Smith's book on memory, medicine, and hereditary fate in rural Columbia. She followed researchers who have studied Paisa mutation, a gene that spreads from a common ancestor, which causes disease in almost everyone who inherits it. In Antioquia, scientists have identified 1,000 to 1,800 vectors for this particular gene, making up one of the largest group of family cases on Earth. Smith, a science journalist, also tells the story of 6,000 clan members who participated in research trials, donated their loved ones’ brains, and cared for each other, while preparing for their turn.

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Dementia is one of the most terrible diseases in the modern world, only in part because we see it last longer. In an era of personal identity and self-expression, it is often crucial that conditions have the potential to completely eliminate the self. Smith's book is a detailed chronicle of a family and scientist pieced together by a mutation, not just a grim catalog of family diseases. Through her conversation with the character for over six years, Smith suggests that forgetting may be more than just a loss of survival. It could also be to explore other forms of human beings based on sensation, presence or touch.

García Márquez's 1967 novel follows the seven generations of the fictional Colombian town of Weimaiwuhou, a place plagued by war and magic. Early in the story, a mysterious plague lands in the town, causing insomnia and erasing memories. García Márquez's fictional world wanders Forgotten valleywith Antioquia's truly extensive, dramatic memory loss, real experiences resonate silently. The copy of the novel is accompanied by a woman Smith met on a 10-hour bus. When clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease treatment were launched in Antioquia in 2013, scientists compared it to the magical elixir that terminates Macondo's amnesia. (After disappointing results, chlortrimonomab studies were stopped in 2022.)

One hundred years of loneliness It is a famous work of magical realism. Its schedule collapses and is vague, and its characteristics are bound by devastating, inevitable fate. Readers cannot avoid losing their way. (García Márquez died of dementia in 2014, and he once described memory as material and method for his life’s work: “At the bottom, I wrote only one book, one, circling around a circle, and proceeded.”)

In Antioquia, many people connected by Paisa mutations have similar distortion. Here, Alzheimer's disease is not only a disease in the elderly, but can attack adults as early as in their 30s. Relatives care about their family while expecting that they may need the same help from younger relatives. "Each death caused them to relive the trauma of previous deaths and raise the ghost of the future," Smith wrote. "Diagnosis is not a personal experience, but a collective bondage. "Looking at these Alzheimer's clans, the story is no longer personal. The solution is lost. The family is a unit," Smith wrote, "its branches continue to grow and shrink like fractals."

Both García Márquez and Smith’s stories invite readers to rethink memory, something that is relationship, inheritance and eternity, rather than a strict personal and chronological order. Smith notes that in Antioquia, families carrying Paisa mutations offer scientists a rare opportunity: a known genetic cause of early onset of Alzheimer's disease, which they may develop targeted treatments. But that's not all. "The Smiths observed that there was “other type of knowledge,” she wrote, “they carried, there was no formal way to classify or spread them, as well as their coveted genes and biomarkers. ”

This understanding is not clinical, but embodied - people feel, witness, share and convey. When a researcher asked why so many Antioquia were willing to give their blood, brain and time to experiment, the answer came quickly: “For the kids,” they said. "Break the chain." Memories are not just what they recall. This is also the way generations learn to take care of each other.

Among ancient European philosophers, cognitive decline in later life was often seen as a medical condition, but an inevitable result of aging or punishment for personal defects. (Now, some communities see dementia as a symptom of older people, not as a disease, as in the Starr country in Texas.) In Asian and Middle Eastern traditions, dementia has historically been associated with madness or stupidity. In contrast, memory loss in older people is sometimes seen as the ultimate prosperity of their life cycle in many Aboriginal communities: a person is in a spiritual phase near the Creator.

Until the early 20th century, scientists (by microscopy and technology to make brain tissue visible at the cellular level) could distinguish the structure of Alzheimer's disease: a tangle bundle between internal and neurons and a bunch of unfolded proteins. However, looking at the disease under a microscope does not necessarily fully understand it.

Antioquia's family has long seen dementia clinically but supernatally. "Kanoas's traditional wisdom believes it is witchcraft, which may mean a lot of things," Smith wrote, "a curse of a contemptuous lover. The punishment of the cruel pastor. Encounter with Arboloco - "Crazy Tree". "The person who thinks that he is in a disoriented and ridiculous state is EnyerbadoShe wrote, or “under the spell”; Bobo ("Silly") or madness ("Hardhead"), "but they don't call the patient."

Many popular metaphors of dementia suggest erosion: the candle burns or serves as the shell of the pre-self that it accommodates. Others disappeared suddenly: fog, voids and black holes. Dementia is described as an invading enemy, launching a war in the mind, as described by author and activist Thomas Debaggio in 2002's memoir, "The Holocaust of My Brain" Loss of mind. These metaphors ultimately reveal the struggle for dementia to be completely confronted with dementia, a horrible cognitive dissolution.

The brain is often seen as an engine and archive of a person’s identity. From this perspective, losing memory is a dispute about losing one's own self-awareness. García Márquez wrote in the inscription of his 2002 memoir: "Life is not a person's life. In other words, a person's self-survival depends on the ability to continuously narrate it in order to direct oneself in time, space and plot.

Dementia resists both emotional understanding and rational interpretation; it remains one of the most stubborn mysteries of medicine. Despite billions of dollars in investment and more than a century of research, scientists have not fully understood what causes it or how to cure it, and diagnosis can be challenging. Paradoxically, for those who experience dementia, there is only a serious certainty: they will die from it. This tension matures the disease of symbolic language. Susan Sontag Disease is a metaphor“The tendency to mean a lot.”

exist Forgotten valleySmith described a 25-year-old Daniela woman who cared about her mother and her extended family because of the early onset of Alzheimer’s behavior in this generation—seven of her mother’s 10 siblings had become sick or had died of the disease as Smith reported.

Daniela affectionately gave her Aunt Mabilia shower-Kisses, Ice Pops, complimented her appearance. When her Uncle Freddy has only one word left-Yes- Daniela recited a familiar name for him, and everyone's face illuminated. When her mother Doralba refused, Daniela changed her diapers, rubbed her skin with lotion, and refused to cut her hair long - "concessions," Smith wrote: "No one wants to steal her from the woman she wears proudly."

In the last few hours of Doraba, Daniela massaged her limbs as her breath began to rattle. Daniela cleansed her for the last time after her mother passed away, putting the lotion on her skin as usual. "Because for that moment, it was like she was still alive," she told Smith. She then handed her mother's body to Neurociencias in the Antioquia Research Laboratory, which found the Paisa mutation and studied it for decades.

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The relationship between Daniela and Doralba goes beyond cognition. People with dementia may lose their name, date, and recognize their face. But as disease deprives one memory, it can deepen other memories: emotions, feelings. When my grandmother's dementia progressed, she once told me that I was her sister. Of course, this is not literally true, but her feelings are emotionally honest. As Smith points out in the last page of her book, each generation of potential Paisa mutant vectors must face the future, sometimes multiple, sometimes opposite truths: “This is what the family has learned over the past four decades of participation in science: resisting improper hope and resisting despair.”

What if people think of the new metaphor for dementia? In neuroscience, the brain is sometimes described as a forest - neurons represent trees. Dendritic (from the ancient Greek "tree", Branchy) represents a branch. Some writers, such as Claude Couturier, in her 1999 memoir Difficulty, a day for Alzheimer'sdescribing the life of dementia is like a tree in autumn, "I desperately grasp the dead tree and tore it off by a storm."

But the fallen leaves do not have to be a symbol of death. Leaf garbage has the life of hundreds of species: bacteria, ants, mushrooms, sh. Even bare trees live in invisible ways - communicate and share nutrients through underground networks of roots and fungi sometimes called "wood wide nets."

To view dementia as a tree is to embrace a magical realism: to understand that fresh buds connected even if the older buds fall, the roots remain, and this coexistence of rot and renewal. As the patriarch of Garcia Márquez's novel, witnessing the fate of her family repeating, he shouted: "I know all this in my heart. It seems that it's time, time has turned around and we're back."

Once, Daniela reminded Smith that her half-sister and cousin were in her 30s, an era when Alzheimer's disease often appeared in the family. She herself is close to 30 years old. But Daniela believes that the mother's doomsday is not annihilated, but something profound in humanity - people usually understand it.

Daniela concluded: "She doesn't remember me anymore. Even if she tries to do this, she can't find me. But she brings me into her soul and her heart because she can feel me." "Although she can't say that, her eyes can."