Dementia is not contagious, unless that is, I believe it to be.
Society doesn’t consider dementia to be a disease that we catch from either other people or our environment. It is not seen as an infection caused by a bacteria or a virus.
Logic dictates that if dementia is not caused by an external agent, it must be self induced. It is not consciously self-induced, which means it must be sub-consciously Self-induced. This puts it beyond the investigation of neurological or biological science.
Dementia could, as many people believe, be caused by the brain wearing out due to old age. However, early onset dementia seems to suggest otherwise. If I can suffer with dementia at any age then, by definition, dementia is not an affliction caused by old age.
Neurologists are actively looking for the physical cause of brain cell depletion in dementia patients because it believes that the loss of grey matter results in the loss of memory. This belief is founded on scientific thinking that has no distinction between the brain and the mind. Therefore the belief is, if I am losing brain cells, I am losing my mind.
A non-scientific perspective may ask: Why does a mental disconnection of the mind cause a physical deterioration in the brain? Could it be that brain cells become redundant through lack of use? Physiology accepts muscle wastage as a symptom of prolonged physical inactivity, so is mental inactivity a prime candidate for brain cell wastage?
Mental activity is not just rational thinking but also emotional feeling, intuition, creative innovation, imagination & visualisation, to name just a few. Rational scientific thinking that is devoid of intuitive creative imagination looks in the physical brain for the cause of dementia because it is devoid of any innovative ideas.
Is it not simply obvious that a mental disorder has a mental cause rather than a physical cause? As a hundred years of psychiatry have revealed, pills and potions have never managed to cure a mental illness.
The mental problem is that creativity, innovation, imagination, visualisation & intuition all require emotional power to access the authority of the mind. When science looks only at the rational scenarios of dementia, emotional power never enters the equation.
Whereas dementia is not contagious, rational thinking that is devoid of emotional feeling is contagious, and it is rampant in academia.
The reality is that everyone is individually creating their own reality by virtue of their own unique thinking, even though the majority of people are totally unaware of it. The resultant effect is that everyone is trying to conform to the same reality as everyone else because they believe that this is most socially acceptable.
One of the effects of dementia is the inability to create one’s own meaningful reality. This makes it impossible to make sense of the reality that is being realised by either ourself or other people. It is this failure to conform with what is considered normality that society deems to be demented and unacceptable. Society has decided that there is only one valid reality and it prefers all members of that society to conform to it.
Geneticists tell us that we all have the same human genes and we inherit a unique set of genes from our parents. This means that as human Beings, we are all genetically the same, yet we are all genetically different. Society believes that we should all share the same ethical & moral standards of behaviour, whilst the Individual strives to be free to lead their own life of choice.
Genes are apparently inherited, therefore not deemed to be contagious. Our belief system, however, is contagious. We catch it from our parents, our teachers, our friends, our work colleagues, our ministers, our scientists and our politicians.
We do not tend to look at beliefs as an infection that we can catch, even though we are deeply influenced by both the positive & negative beliefs & behaviours of other people. In our polarised view of reality, we are unaware of how negative & limiting our beliefs and our fears really are.
Limiting beliefs & fears are very contagious, in extreme cases causing panic, paranoia & hysteria. The more we suppress our fears, the more sub-conscious our beliefs become, the more unaware we are of our own negatively contagious thinking, and the more insensitive we become to other people emotionally.
Where our belief system forms the foundation of our character and our emotional needs form the basis of our personality, then there seems to be a logic relationship between our mental beliefs, our emotional needs and our physical genetic make-up.
When in the future, it is discovered that the belief system that determines our behaviour, which influences our emotional state of being, also determines our genetic make-up; then far from being a product of our genes, we are in fact a product of our belief system.
From this perspective, dementia will be viewed as a genetic illness that we inherit with our belief system; unless we take the view that because we are responsible for creating our own reality, we are in fact responsible for creating our own dementia.