Mediating Alzheimer's: Cognition and Personhood

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An exploration of the representational culture of Alzheimers disease and how media technologies shape our ideas of cognition and aging

With no known cause or cure despite a century of research, Alzheimers disease is a true medical mystery. In Mediating Alzheimers, Scott Selberg examines the nature of this enduring national health crisis by looking at the diseases relationship to media and representation. He shows how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with this disease.

Selberg demonstrates how the cognitive abilities that Alzheimers threatensmemory, for exampleare integrated into the operations of representational technologies, from Polaroid photographs to Post-its to digital artificial intelligence. Focusing on a wide variety of media technologies, such as neuroimaging, art therapy, virtual reality, and social media, he shows how these cognitively oriented media ultimately help define personhood for people with Alzheimers. Media have changed the practices of successful aging in the United States, and Selberg takes us deep into how technologies like digital brain-training and online care networks shape ideas of cognition and healthy aging.

Packed with startlingly fresh insights, Mediating Alzheimers contributes to debates around bioethics, the labor of caregiving, and a national economy increasingly invested in communication and digital media. Probing the very technologies that promise to save and understand our brains, it gives us new ways of understanding Alzheimers disease and aging in America.

Author Bio

Scott Selberg is a member of the faculty of the Department of Communication at Portland State University.