"Vocabulary Changes... as an Indication of Dementia"

Retrospective diagnostic strategy employing linguistic analysis of works by the champion of murder-mysteries, from the Times:

"Did Agatha Christie, who wrote several dozen mystery novels during her 53-year career, suffer from Alzheimer's-related dementia? Though some of her biographers have suspected as much, actual evidence was advanced in March by a research team led by Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, professors at the University of Toronto, in a paper called 'Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie's Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia.'"

Read more here...

"Lipid Lectures"

The lecture starts droning
and the kids stop chatting
and the heads begin to drop;
and a small pattering of keys
babble and yak to each other
like gnats, drowning the drone.
Then a key point is mouthed
to an ocean of Powerpoint light
projected before a rapt lecture hall
that alternatively nods
and nods off;

Which starts a thousand manic fingers
over laptop keyboards,
building a subtle crescendo,

a tingle in a sleeping foot,

an ocean wave
washing over the shore,

or the sound of pebbles
raked from the beach
on a wave's long regress.

Then it's pulled back
into the pulsating sea of a void
where knowledge goes
to procreate and die,
and the scattered key clicking
ticks and resumes,
like countless cockroaches
in basement cracks.