That’s it; person, woman, man, camera, tv. I did it. I remembered five items in order, which puts me in the top one percent of all people. It’s a proud day.
While I am not as old as Joe Biden or Donald Trump, I am getting older so it’s nice to know that I’m still in the “genius” category when it comes to cognitive testing. In fact, I never considered myself a genius, always thinking that I was a little smarter than average (don’t we all think that?).
Sure, Joe Biden and Donald Trump both seem to get confused at times, misstating world leaders’ names, misplacing countries, mixing up politicians, and forgetting dates of past events.
I must admit that if someone asks me what year each of my parents died, I may have to go back and calculate it, often based upon other events that happened near the same time.
Consider it; if you were asked about something that happened ten or twenty years ago, could you pick the year without some thought? The older I get, the more recent each event seems to get. Can you remember what year Robin Williams died? Take a guess.
Donald Trump occasionally repeats himself, and in his campaign rallies he has often recounted how he aced a cognitive test that was administered to him while he was president. He has more recently added that he had to distinguish between pictures of three animals, picking out the whale from the group; he declared, “I’m cognitively there.”
I don’t mean to brag, but I think I could pick out the whale, too, as long as the pictures weren’t painted by Picasso.
“I think it was 35, 30 questions,” the former president said of the test, which he said involved a few animal identification queries. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that — a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions] and then it gets harder and harder and harder.” Wow, how much harder could it get?
Ziad Nasreddine, the Canadian neurologist who invented the test, said the assessment is intended to test for signs of dementia or other cognitive decline, and has never once included a drawing of a whale. Experts note that the assessment is not an I.Q. or intelligence test, though Trump has often talked about it as if it were. Person, woman, man, camera, TV, whale… Whoops. Genius? Maybe not.
Both Trump and Biden have invited scrutiny of their mental acuity. Face it, age is a thief and does not discriminate.
Potential voters express more concern about Biden’s age than Trump’s. In a November Marquette Law School national poll asking whether Biden or Trump are “too old to be president,” a 57 percent majority felt that this applies to Biden compared with 23 percent for Trump. Is it just because Biden looks so old?
Our 2024 options are limited, and most voters wish we had better choices. No argument here, but let’s keep our eye on the ball. Don’t vote for age because they are both old. But maybe we should also not cast a vote based upon gas going up or down a nickel that week. Maybe we should go to the polls this November and vote for what’s best for the country, no matter the current cost of a dozen eggs.
Let us take one more look at the test. Much like the phantom whale, Nasreddine said the cognitive testing sequence would not properly evaluate if it had pairs of connected words like “woman” and “man,” or “camera” and “TV.” Those connected words would have never been on the test.
So, the words are incorrect, and there was no whale. Memory is a tricky thing.
Robin Williams took his own life in 2014; did you get that right?
Curt MacRae is a resident of Coldwater, MI, and publishes opinion columns regularly.
Tweets @curtmacrae — comments to rantsbymac@gmail.com
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