5 Strange Dementia Behaviors and Why They Happen

0:00Careblazer, welcome back to another episode where we talk about everything dementia. In today's video, I'm going to talk about five strange dementia behaviors that actually make perfect sense when you understand what I'll tell you about them. Careblazer, real quick, if you learn better by watching things, then you can hop on over to my YouTube channel where I post these podcasts in video format, sometimes have different visuals to help people learn even better. You can just type in Care Blazers into YouTube and I will pop up. All right, let's get back to today's podcast. Now, these are behaviors that from the outside, when you don't know what's happening in the brain, it can look like the person is being lazy, stubborn, rude, that they're in denial, or that they're quite frankly, just lying to your face.

0:50So in the next few minutes, I want to talk about why these behaviors look like a person who simply doesn't want to get up off the couch or who is swearing to your face when all you're trying to do is help them. And every single one of these strange behaviors have a explanation of what's going on in the brain to make this happen. So it's not just the label of the behavior, which is what we typically hear about. It's actually the explanation behind it as well. And I'm saving the one that surprises Care Blazers the most for last. Because here's what I've learned about working in the dementia field for many years.

1:27Almost nothing is totally random. Almost nothing that is stressing us out is a conscious choice that the person with dementia is making to make life more difficult for everyone. What looks strange from the outside is actually the brain not doing the job that it is designed to do. So by the end of this video, my hope is that you will look at these five behaviors completely differently. First, we'll start with apathy. This is a really painful one for family members to watch happen. This is where the person who loved to golf all of a sudden doesn't seem to care to golf anymore. They just sit in the chair, don't really seem to be excited about anything at all.

2:08It feels like it takes so much convincing and urging for them to just move. Or maybe the person that used to love getting visits from their grandchildren no longer seem to care at all, don't even seem to want to get up from the couch when the grandchildren come to visit. Basically, it's when somebody loses that spark, loses their get up and go, loses their emotion and love and desire for things that they used to enjoy.

2:36Teepa Snow: Now, this is very easy to read as depression, and it very possibly could be, which is why we should always be including our medical providers in our care so that they can do a thorough evaluation. But apathy certainly does get confused with depression a lot, where the person with dementia just doesn't seem to have any interest to do anything. They seem content to just sit there. But I want to be clear about this. Apathy is not depression. Depression comes with emotional pain. And apathy is basically the loss or drive to start something or to engage in something. Even if the desire is there underneath, they just don't really care to do it.

3:16Teepa Snow: So here's what's actually happening in the brain. Every single action that you and I take, it requires sort of our motivation switch in the brain to click on. And that motivation switch is fueled by dopamine, the same chemical that's responsible for pushing you toward a goal. So in many types of dementia, that dopamine switch gets disrupted. You can think about it maybe like a car with a full tank of gas, but a faulty ignition. It doesn't matter that the gas tank is full and ready to go. The car just won't turn on. So the desire, aka the gas, might still be there, but the ignition, the part that turns the part in the brain on, that is broken.

3:59So apathy, it's not a lack of love. It's not even necessarily a lack of desire. It's just that broken motivation switch that turns it on. Number two, second one, I've talked about it a lot on this channel because up to 80 % of all people with dementia will eventually develop this condition. And that is the condition of analcygnosia. Maybe your loved one thinks they can still drive. They can still work. They can still manage the finances. They don't need your help. Maybe they just flat out do not believe they have dementia. If it looks like denial to you, it is likely anus agnosia, a neurological condition, which literally means lack of awareness.

4:40They lack awareness of what they are no longer capable of doing. They lack awareness of their limitations. So you might be noticing or feeling like they're just lying to themselves or they are in denial.

4:52Teepa Snow: You might notice your loved one gets angry at you if you bring anything up that mentions their dementia or mentions their limitations, mentions what they can no longer do anymore or that they need help. So basically we can think about what's happening in the brain here as a self-checking system. So our brains are able to compare what we are able to do versus what we are actually doing. So your brain has this ability to say like, I think I can do this. And then you do something and it's like, here's what I'm actually doing, in the person with analcygnosis, that connection doesn't happen. This condition happens in other diseases besides dementia, for instance, stroke.

5:35Teepa Snow: Somebody might have a paralyzed arm, but they are insisting that it's fine and that it could work even though they can't move their arm. It's because the brain that tells them what they can do is no longer functioning appropriately. So here, the most important thing to know, it's not that the person is in denial. It's that there's a broken mirror in their brain. Their brain is not able to self-reflect and self-check what their actual abilities are. That's why I always say for somebody who does have this condition, trying to argue with them, convince them, reason with them, show them evidence of why they are no longer able to do certain things or why they actually do have dementia.

6:14Teepa Snow: It's like trying to convince a blind person to see, no matter how well you describe it or how much you beg them to open their eyes wider, they're never going to be able to see it. That is what it's like with anosognosia. No matter how much you tell them they're no longer able to do certain things, their brain will not be able to see it. Okay, let's move on to symptom number three. This one is apraxia. Are we noticing a theme here? A lot of these symptoms start with the word A, anosognosia, apathy. Now we are on apraxia. This really has to do with motor function and behaviors. So let's say you hand your loved one with dementia, a toothbrush, and they just hold it.

6:52Teepa Snow: They just stare at it. They don't know what to do with it. Or maybe they take an object like a fork and they try to comb their hair with it. Their arm works fine. Their motor ability is actually fine. Their strength is fine. However, somehow the task you are asking them to do seems impossible. Their brain just isn't able to go through the motions. You might ask them to fold a piece of paper and put it in an envelope. You might ask them to button their clothing. And even though you've seen their hands work perfectly fine and all of their muscles are fine, it does not compute in their brain. So this is not clumsiness.

7:30Teepa Snow: It's not that they're not trying. It's not that they just want you to do the task you know, or you think you know, they're capable of doing, right? So sometimes careblazers will tell me, well, I know I've seen him press the button on a remote control. So I know he has the ability to maybe button his jacket, but he won't do it. It's not that at all. So picture this, the brain has a library of movement kind of stored in the back of our brain. And it captures all the movements we would do like buttoning, zipping, pushing, pressing, folding, combing, all these things, right? And what happens is that in order to exhibit that motor control, the information has to travel down a pathway in the brain that controls movement, which is kind of in our parietal lobe in the back of the brain.

8:22Teepa Snow: So when dementia impacts the parietal lobe, that pathway, the library of movement, it's going to make it difficult. It gets disrupted and it's going to make it difficult for the person to carry out the behavior, even though they have the physical ability to do so. It's the cognitive ability that's getting disrupted. It's literally a broken connection between their body and their brain. Let's move on to the next symptoms. We're going to get out of the A's. We're going to go into disinhibition, which is basically a really, really hard one for families because a lot of times the person with dementia has no awareness that they are dishibited, which basically is if your loved one does things that are socially inappropriate, maybe they say something embarrassing in front of a room full of people, or they alert something out that would be considered rude, that normally like our inner voice would say, oh, keep it together.

9:17Teepa Snow: Don't say that out loud. That would be rude. The person with dementia, when they have disinhibition, they just blurt these things out sometimes, or they act certain things out that would not be considered socially appropriate. So maybe they might, I don't know, take off their pants in the middle of a crowded room because they needed to go to the bathroom and weren't aware that they were in the middle of a crowded room or because they got hot and they wanted to take off their pants. We have also seen extreme examples of people who will just start self-pleasing themselves in a public place or when they're in a place in their home where there's other people around.

9:54Teepa Snow: This definitely has to do with the frontal lobes, the frontal part of our brain, which really governs our ability to be aware of what is appropriate and what's not appropriate to also stop us from following through with our impulses. I don't know if any of you maybe sometimes have these like impulsive thoughts and we know we can stop ourselves from engaging in them. For somebody who has frontal lobe damage, this is really difficult and this is where we see the disinhibition. So it often looks like rudeness to everyone else, but really it's just difficulty in the frontal lobes of the brain. Okay.

10:30And the last one is called confabulation. Let's say your loved one with dementia tells you with complete absolute confidence that they already had breakfast today. 10 minutes ago, they just finished eating or they just took a shower.

10:45Teepa Snow: They don't need to take a shower. Or their sister called them yesterday and they talked on the phone, but their sister has been deceased for 10 years. But they are adamant that all of this is true and they are telling you as if it is true. This is called confabulation. Many families feel betrayed by it. Many families feel like their loved one is outright lying to them. But lying requires knowing the truth. And for the person with dementia, they don't remember the truth. They don't know the truth. Their brain is trying to fill in gaps with what they think is truth. So when we pull up a memory in our brain, our brain, basically our frontal lobes again, it's running a quiet background check to make sure like cross-referencing it.

11:27Teepa Snow: Is this accurate? Is it not? Before we say it out loud, these things happen in splits of second. We're not even aware of all the amazing miraculous things that our brain actually does for us. But that's what's happening when we're pulling up a memory. Is this a memory? What happened? And it's working together with the hippocampus, which is basically the brain's memory center. And for people with confabulation, that background check, the frontal lobe and hippocampus together, it's not communicating accurately. So the hippocampus, which is pulling up a memory, maybe they did eat breakfast. Maybe at one point in time, they did talk to their sister before their sister was dead.

12:04Teepa Snow: It's pulling up that memory, but the cross-referencing, the brain checking that's happening in the frontal lobes, it's not working properly. So it's giving you information from a wrong point in time. It literally skips the double checking process completely. Somebody who has confabulation, they're not lying. Basically what it is, is their brain is filling in blanks without knowing that it's doing it. They aren't aware that they're doing it. So when you correct them and they are adamant that that is not accurate, that what they are saying is the truth. That's why, because their brain is telling them that is the truth.

12:38So let's bring this all together. The big takeaway I want you to take from all five of these symptoms, apathy, anosognosia, apraxia, disinhibition, and confabulation, is that these are five completely different symptoms, five like different parts of the brain that are not doing their job well anymore. Our brains are doing its jobs well, And it's doing it without us even having to focus on it, which is why when we see it in

13:05Teepa Snow: our loved ones with dementia, it's so confusing to us. It's so strange. We just can't understand how somebody wouldn't be able to understand that they can't do certain things anymore or that they didn't talk to a person who is no longer alive anymore. It doesn't make sense to us because our brains are working and wired great. And for our loved ones, unfortunately, it's not. Hopefully this video helps give a little bit more brain-based explanation for the strange behaviors that we're seeing. But I understand that that's helpful in some degree to know that your loved one's not doing this on purpose.

13:42Teepa Snow: However, I also know there's a question or scream in your mind, like, what the heck do I do next? How do I respond when my loved one says these things? So that is where we come together inside the Care Collective program every single week. and we talk about your personal situation that you are going through, what is the behavior you are facing, and we work through together what would be a response for you to try to avoid making them more upset or angry. And at the very least, how do we de-escalate the situation as much as possible? Also, my book, The Dementia Care Toolkit, is coming out and you can pre-order it right now, or maybe at the time you're watching this, it is already out.

14:28Teepa Snow: It comes out October, 2026. And that is literally, you can just open up a page and there is a strategy in there for you to try. So if you can't join us inside of the Care Collective where we can work personally with you, you can at least open up a page of that book and there will be a strategy for you to try in there for all of these strange, confusing behaviors. Now, Careblazer, I'm curious, does your loved one have any of these behaviors? Which ones are you noticing in your loved ones? You can leave them below. And if you have discovered something that has truly helped, then you can leave that in the comments below and we can help each other out.

15:02Every comment you leave underneath these videos literally helps another Careblazer watching this video, scrolling, letting them know they are not alone and maybe even sparking an idea that they haven't had before. Also, if you're wondering why it seems like I'm moving a lot down here, it's because this girl won't leave me alone as I'm recording today. We had recording for the Careblazers. Nico left me alone. Milo left me alone. Not Lola. So world, this is Lola. All right, Care Blazers. I will be back next week with another video as always. Sending you so much love. Hang in there. Bye.