5 Strange Dementia Behaviors That Actually Make Perfect Sense

From the outside, when you do not know what is happening in the brain, these behaviors can look like the person is being lazy, stubborn, rude, in denial, or quite frankly, just lying to your face.

But every single one of these strange dementia behaviors has an explanation for what is going on in the brain to make it happen. That is the part almost nobody tells you.

After many years of working in the dementia field, here is what I have learned. Almost nothing is totally random. Almost nothing that is stressing you out is a conscious choice your loved one is making to make life more difficult for everyone. What looks strange from the outside is actually the brain not doing the job it was designed to do.

So I want to walk through five strange dementia behaviors and, more importantly, what is happening in the brain to cause each one. Not just the label, which is what we usually hear about, but the actual explanation underneath it. I am saving the one that surprises Careblazers the most for last.

“He Is Just Being Lazy”: Apathy and the Broken Motivation Switch

This is a painful one to watch.

The person who loved to golf suddenly does not care about golf. They sit in the chair and do not seem excited about anything. It takes so much convincing just to get them to move. Or the person who used to light up when the grandchildren visited will not get up off the couch when they arrive.

Basically, they lose their spark. They lose their get up and go. They lose the desire for the things they used to love.

This is very easy to read as depression, and it very possibly could be, which is why your medical provider should always be involved. But apathy and depression are not the same thing. Depression comes with emotional pain. Apathy is the loss of drive to start something. Even when the desire is still there underneath, they just do not care to act on it.

Here is what is actually happening in the brain.

Every action you and I take requires a motivation switch to click on, and that switch runs on dopamine, the chemical that pushes you toward a goal. In many types of dementia, that switch gets disrupted.

Think about it like a car with a full tank of gas but a faulty ignition. It does not matter that the tank is full and ready to go. The car just will not turn on.

The desire, the gas, might still be there. But the ignition, the part that turns it on, is broken.

So apathy is not a lack of love. It is not even necessarily a lack of desire. It is a broken motivation switch. It is also worth knowing that some people are aware they are struggling even when it looks like they have stopped caring.

Researchers studying these families named their paper after the exact sentence caregivers kept saying: “He Just Doesn’t Want to Get Out of the Chair and Do It.” If that sentence has been in your head, you are in ordinary company.

“She Is In Denial About Her Dementia”: Anosognosia and the Broken Mirror

I talk about this one a lot, because up to 80% of people with Alzheimer’s disease will eventually develop it. Estimates vary by how it is measured, but by any measure it is common.

Maybe your loved one thinks they can still drive. Still work. Still manage the finances. Or maybe they flat out do not believe they have dementia at all.

If it looks like denial to you, it is likely anosognosia, a neurological condition that literally means lack of awareness. They lack awareness of what they can no longer do. They lack awareness of their limitations.

So it feels like they are lying to themselves. It feels like denial. And you might notice they get angry at you if you bring up the dementia at all, or mention their limitations, or suggest they need help.

Here is the brain part.

Your brain runs a self-checking system. It compares what you think you can do against what you are actually doing. Your brain says “I think I can do this,” you go do it, and then your brain says “here is what actually happened.”

In a person with anosognosia, that connection does not happen.

This shows up after stroke too. Someone with a paralyzed arm may insist the arm is fine, even though they cannot move it. The part of the brain that tells them what they are capable of is no longer working.

So the most important thing to understand is this. It is not that your loved one is in denial. It is that there is a broken mirror in their brain. Their brain cannot self-reflect and check its own abilities.

This is why I always say that arguing with them, reasoning with them, or showing them evidence of what they can no longer do is like trying to convince a blind person to see. No matter how well you describe it, no matter how much you beg them to open their eyes wider, they are never going to see it.

That is what anosognosia is like. No matter how many times you tell them, their brain will not be able to see it.

“He Could Do It If He Wanted To”: Apraxia and the Library of Movement

You hand your loved one a toothbrush and they just hold it. They stare at it. They do not know what to do with it. Or they pick up a fork and try to comb their hair with it.

Their arm works fine. Their strength is fine. Their motor ability is fine. And yet the task you are asking for seems impossible.

You ask them to fold a piece of paper into an envelope, or button their shirt. You have watched those hands work perfectly well, and still it does not compute.

This is apraxia, and it is not clumsiness. It is not that they are not trying. It is not that they want you to do a task you know they are capable of.

Careblazers tell me some version of this all the time: “I know I have seen him press the button on a remote control, so I know he has the ability to button his jacket, but he will not do it.”

It is not that at all.

Picture it this way. The brain keeps a library of movement, storing everything we do without thinking. Buttoning, zipping, pushing, folding, combing. To carry out one of them, the information travels down a pathway that controls movement, largely in the parietal lobe toward the back of the brain.

When dementia affects the parietal lobe, that pathway gets disrupted. The library is there. The route to it is damaged. So the person cannot carry out the movement even though they have every physical ability to do so.

It is literally a broken connection between their body and their brain. The physical ability is intact. The cognitive ability to access it is not. I have written more about why simple tasks become so difficult if this is the one you are living with.

“She Is Being Rude On Purpose”: Disinhibition and the Missing Brake

This one is genuinely hard on families, partly because the person with dementia usually has no awareness that it is happening.

Disinhibition is when your loved one does things that are socially inappropriate. They say something embarrassing in front of a room full of people, or blurt out something that lands as rude. Most of us have a quiet internal editor saying “keep it together, do not say that out loud.”

With disinhibition, that editor is gone. So they say it. Or they act on it.

Maybe they take off their pants in a crowded room, because they needed the bathroom and did not register the room, or because they got hot. In more extreme cases, families see loved ones begin touching themselves in front of others.

This comes down to the frontal lobes, the part of the brain that governs our sense of what is appropriate and, just as importantly, our ability to stop ourselves from acting on an impulse.

Most of us have impulsive thoughts. We also have the brake that stops us acting on them. When the frontal lobes are damaged, that brake is gone.

So it looks like rudeness to everyone in the room. It is a brain that has lost its brake.

“He Is Lying Right To My Face”: Confabulation and the Missing Background Check

Here is the one that surprises Careblazers most.

Your loved one tells you with complete, absolute confidence that they already had breakfast ten minutes ago. Or that they just took a shower and do not need another. Or that their sister called yesterday and they talked on the phone, when their sister has been gone for ten years.

And they are adamant. They tell you as though it is simply true.

This is called confabulation, and many families feel betrayed by it. Many feel like their loved one is lying straight to their face.

But lying requires knowing the truth. And for the person with dementia, they do not remember the truth. They do not know it. Their brain is filling in the gap with what it believes is true.

When we pull up a memory, our frontal lobes run a quiet background check against it. Is this accurate? Is it from the right point in time? That happens in a split second, and we never notice our brain doing it. It works with the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center.

In confabulation, that check fails. The hippocampus pulls up a memory, and it may be a real one. They probably did eat breakfast. They probably did talk to their sister, before she died. But the cross referencing is not working, so the brain hands over real material from the wrong point in time.

It skips the double checking entirely.

So they are not lying. Their brain is filling in blanks without knowing it is doing it. And when you correct them and they insist they are right, that is exactly why. Their brain is telling them it is the truth.

If this is the one hitting your family hardest, I have gone deeper into why people with dementia seem to lie. And if you are wrestling with whether to correct them or go along with it, that is a separate question I have answered in when it is okay to lie to someone with dementia.

What All Five of These Have in Common

Apathy. Anosognosia. Apraxia. Disinhibition. Confabulation.

Five completely different symptoms, coming from five different parts of the brain that are no longer doing their job.

Our brains do these jobs well, and without us ever having to think about it. Which is exactly why it is so confusing to watch it fail in someone we love. We cannot understand how a person would not grasp that they can no longer do certain things, or that they did not speak to someone who is gone.

It does not make sense to us because our brains are working and wired well. And for our loved ones, they are not.

Every one of these behaviors has a mechanism underneath it. Once you can see the mechanism, the behavior stops looking like a character flaw and starts looking like what it is.

Knowing Why Helps. It Is Not the Whole Answer.

I know that understanding the brain explanation helps to some degree. Knowing your loved one is not doing this on purpose matters.

But I also know there is a question, or more like a scream, in your mind right now: what the heck do I do next? How do I actually respond when my loved one says these things?

That is what we work through inside the Care Collective every single week. You bring the behavior you are facing and your actual situation, and we work out together what response to try, how to avoid making them more upset or angry, and how to de-escalate as much as possible. You can learn more here.

My book, The Dementia Care Toolkit, comes out in October 2026 and is available for pre-order now. It is built so you can open to a page and find a strategy to try for these exact behaviors.

Now I am curious. Which of these five are you noticing in your loved one? Leave it in the comments under the video. Every comment helps another Careblazer who is scrolling and wondering if anyone else is dealing with the same thing, and sometimes it sparks an idea they had not thought of.

Sources & References

• “He Just Doesn’t Want to Get Out of the Chair and Do It”: The Impact of Apathy in People with Dementia on Their Carers, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, via PubMed Central
• The association between anosognosia and neuropsychiatric symptoms in neurodegenerative dementias: a narrative review, Frontiers in Neurology, 2025