Nonfluent aphasia is probably what you would more immediately imagine in terms of communication issues. It’s an inability of the affected person to express themselves through language, though, most evilly, they usually do not have issues understanding others or even understanding what they WANT to say. For example, with Broca’s aphasia, the most common form of nonfluent aphasia, someone who might want to ask for you to pick up eggs at the store might say something like “store eggs.” There are other varieties, like global aphasia, which results in broad difficulty speaking or understanding language, or anomic aphasia, where the person has extreme difficulty naming things and objects, even if they know exactly what they are.
Fluent aphasia is even more unsettling, and a reminder of just how complicated and fragile the human brain is. The most common form is Wernicke’s aphasia, where the person speaks comfortably and in a natural rhythm and length, but the sentences spoken may be confusing or nonsensical. They may add unnecessary or unrelated words, or even inject completely made-up words into an otherwise normal sentence. An example given by the NIDCD is the following sentence: “You know that smoodle pinkered and that I want to get him round and take care of him like you want before.”
For any person, it’s a horrific thing to go through, and likely deeply traumatic for their friends and family. For an actor, and one whose voice and iconic lines are burned into much of the population’s memory, it’s particularly ghastly to imagine or witness. As someone who’s witnessed similar mental decay in my life, I can only wish Willis and his family the best, and take some refuge in the great repository of media and memories of Willis before this tragic development available to revisit.
Top Image: Alan Light/Pixabay