4 replies to this topic

[Hip]

If anyone is suffering from tip of the tongue phenomena (lethologica), where you temporarily forget, or cannot bring to mind, a specific word, or the name of a person, place or thing, then coxsackievirus B infection may be the cause.

 

When a nasty Coxsackie B4 virus spread to all my friends and family, thereafter everyone infected with this virus started suffering from lethologica — where a word metaphorically feels as if it is on the tip of your tongue, but you cannot bring the word into consciousness.

 

I don't mean just a momentary tip of the tongue effect, where it takes just a few seconds to recall the right word, but where it can take you literally minutes to bring to mind the right word or name you are looking for. And I don't just mean obscure words or names, but also very common words, or the names of very famous people that everyone knows.

 

All my virally infected friends then started to help each other out in terms of word recall. They started to finish each others' sentences, when one person could not recall the right word.

 

For example, a conversation my infected friends might have would go like this:

 

FIRST PERSON: "Did you hear that story about President,... um, er, you know, whatshisname, you know, the democrat President. He got caught having an affair in the Whitehouse. Plays saxophone. Whatshisname."

 

SECOND PERSON: "President Clinton."

 

FIRST PERSON:"Yes, President Clinton, thank you! Well, there's a story about President Clinton that I heard recently..."

 

This tip of the tongue "disease" is now a permanent feature in all my friends and family. The virus itself spread to my friends and family in around 2003 and 2004, which is quite a while ago, but the tip of the tongue condition it causes in these people has not worn off.

 

Anyone who knows about virology will tell you that coxsackievirus B is able to form chronic low-level infections in various body tissues which never go away. Unlike herpes simplex or Epstein-Barr virus for example, coxsackievirus B does not go into latency (dormancy) in the body, but instead smolders away as a low-level but permanent chronic infection in the tissues (which may include the brain tissues). This Coxsackie B virus is linked to many diseases.

 

 

 

As well as causing this tip of the tongue "disease", this coxsackievirus B4 as it spread to friends and family also cause a number of very serious mental and physical illnesses, including severe anxiety and depression, as well as sudden heart attacks in the previously healthy, viral myocarditis, and ruptured bowels requiring emergency surgery. The list of diseases precipitated by my virus given here.

 

 

Edited by Hip, 25 August 2019 - 08:30 PM.

[Hip]

I should add that this tip of the tongue link to viral infection is just another example of how pathogens in common circulation can screw up the human body and brain/mind. 

 

In my view, longevity researchers will never make any substantial process in increasing healthspan, or obtaining optimum functioning of the human body, until the penny drops for them, and longevity scientists begin realize that pathogens are likely cause for most chronic diseases and shortened healthspans and lifespans, and are the probable primary reason that most of us will suffer from nasty chronic health problems at some point in our lives. 

 

Professor Paul Ewald has for decades argued that pathogens are the likely cause of most chronic diseases of currently unknown etiology, and he suggests we should focus on pathogens as the probable causes of most chronic diseases.  

 

In the view of Prof Paul Ewald takes, evolution builds very reliable creatures that by default remain healthy. So if the body goes wrong, there has to be an external cause (except in the case of purely genetic diseases). Pathogens are the obvious external cause, and we known that there is an evolutionary arms race between pathogens and the creatures they infect. So in spite of the fact that we humans have evolution on our side, continually working to perfect the physical form of the human body, unfortunately pathogens also make use of these forces of evolution to advance themselves as well. For example, most pathogens have evolved the ability to "hack" into our immune systems and thwart the immune response; this is how they are able survive long term in the body.

 

Until longevity researchers, and medical researchers in general, have a lightbulb moment, and realize that pathogens are the probable cause of reduced healthspans and lifespans and all that chronic disease which is about, I don't think human health will ever advance much. 

Edited by Hip, 26 August 2019 - 01:53 AM.

[Hip]

President Barack Obama may have caught virally-triggered tip-of-the-tongue disease:

 

In around December 2014, President Barack Obama developed a mysterious sore throat that would not go away (see for example this article which says: "President Obama reportedly had a mysterious sore throat for weeks").

 

I suspect Obama may have caught the same Coxsackie B4 virus which infected me and all my friends and family, and which caused a chronic sore throat in me and several others who caught it. I detail the various mental and physical symptoms my virus produced (including the tip-of-the-tongue condition) in the people who caught it in this post, and also on my website.

 

 

When Obama developed this chronic sore throat which would not resolve, he consulted medical specialists, who could not find any cause for the soreness, so they dismissed the sore throat as acid reflux (acid reflux is the usual wastebasket diagnosis that ENT specialists give when the cause cannot be found). 

 

I found Obama's sore throat story of great interest when it hit the news, because my viral infection caused a chronic sore throat, and then proceeded to cause many mental and physical symptoms. So when I heard this news story, I wondered if Obama might have caught the same virus as me, and whether any of the mental and physical symptoms would appear in President Obama.

 

Sure enough, I could not help but notice that after Obama's chronic sore throat first appeared in around December 2014, his verbal fluency, and particularly his speed of word recall, dropped quite noticeably in his speeches and press conferences.

 

For example, if you look at this videoed press conference given by Obama in November 2014, which was just before his sore throat hit, Obama is on great form, displaying the sort of effortless, fluid and fasting thinking use of words that he was always characterized for. And alongside this easy eloquence, he has bright and animated facial expressions gracing his speech. This is what Barack Obama was like in the early years of his presidency.

 

But now fast forward to a press conference in May 2016, a year and a half after catching his sore throat, and you notice a definite slowdown in verbal delivery, and a certain difficulty he has in fishing out the right words. So he tends to say "er..." more, and tends to leave long pauses, as he is trying to bring the appropriate word to mind. His delivery definitely shows tip-of-the-tongue difficulties. He is just not as verbally surefooted as he used to be. And what's more, if you watch these two videos carefully, you will notice that his facial expressions are a little flatter, less animated, and almost fatigued-looking sometimes in the 2016 video. My speculative theory is that these changes were all due to the sore throat virus he caught. 

 

 

A complete list of President Barack Obama's speeches and press conferences is found here. You will notice a difference between the early speeches before around 2015, and the later speeches afterwards. All the later speeches tend to have less verbal fluency, and clearly demonstrate this tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, whereas the early speeches displayed an effortless verbal fluidity. 

Edited by Hip, 31 August 2019 - 07:22 PM.

[Hip]

By the way, one supplement I found helps with my tip-of-the-tongue condition is acetyl-L-carnitine (ALC), at a dose of 500 mg or more. Some decades ago I saw a study showing that ALC works well for verbal fluency or verbal intelligence, and over the years I often used ALC to help when writing. I found that ALC would allow me to rapidly fish out the most appropriate words from the recesses of my mind.

 

But you will not notice the effects of ALC unless you are working hard on trying to write detailed descriptions or documentations; then you may find that a dose of ALC taken an hour or two before your start writing seems to help with the word flow and the mental retrieval of the most appropriate words.

 

Ever since catching my virus, however, my verbal fluency has dropped substantially because of this increase tip-of-the-tongue effect. But I find ALC still helps improve my verbal fluency and word flow, even though my general baseline of fluency is lower, due to the tip-of-the-tongue condition my virus causes.

Edited by Hip, 31 August 2019 - 07:36 PM.

[Hip]

In this article you can see diagrams of the areas of the brain that coxsackievirus B infects in myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) patients (the virally infected parts of the brain are in red). Patients with ME/CFS are well-known to have increased difficulty in recalling the right word or name; I even know of one ME/CFS patient who temporarily forgot he own name when an official ask her for it! She had to ask her husband to remind her what her own name was! 

 

ME/CFS patients have been shown to have an ongoing coxsackievirus B (enterovirus) brain infection. ME/CFS is a full-blown illness linked to brain infection.

 

But possibly in healthy people with a more minor tip-of-the-tongue condition, these people may have a milder coxsackievirus B infections in their brain, not enough to cause overt disease like ME/CFS, but significant enough to interfere with verbal fluidity and verbal intelligence. 

 

These tip-of-the-tongue events are always temporarily blockages; you may be unable to recall a word or name now, but later you will remember it. So this is not dementia, this is a temporary transient word forgetfulness. 

Edited by Hip, 31 August 2019 - 07:48 PM.