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In his renowned book One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez describes several generations of the Buendía family's struggles in the fictional town of Macondo. The author writes of sexual desires and love, hatred and war, leadership and revolt. In the midst of all this, the town is also devastated by two plagues: rain and a dementia. People afflicted with the dementia plague have a loss of the “name and notion of things.”
In an “occasional paper,” Rascovsky and colleagues discuss Macondo's neurological plague. They posit that the symptoms of this plague are similar to the symptoms of semantic dementia. Patients with SD have impaired naming and comprehension. Their spontaneous speech is circumlocutory, with sem…