In the case of dementia and Alzheimer’s, dwelling in the past really can be beneficial. However, carers prompt this journey down memory lane for their loved ones, the opportunity to bring self-esteem and comfort into the individual’s life and often to re-engage with the person they remember, if only for a time, is incredibly precious. That can be something as simple as taking someone to a place of significance – or as sophisticated as specialist reminiscence products, arts initiatives and even technology such as apps. The idea has been around since the 1960s, and fundamentally includes anything that involves discussing and sharing memories, helping to re-capture the positive emotions that are integral to them. There are many ways for live-in carers to encourage these memories and these are loosely gathered under the umbrella term ‘Reminiscence Therapy’. These can have the unique ability to bring conversation, comfort and happiness to the person with dementia or Alzheimer’s – as well as offering a communication bridge for loved ones and live-in carers to talk and spend time with them. Recent experiences may not get the chance to become established memories, but older memories are still stored in the brain even until the very latest stages of the disease – and it is these that reminiscence therapy seeks to tap into. In this way, a person may well be able to remember episodes that happened during their youth, but struggle to recall what they did half an hour ago.

Imaging has shown that the hippocampus leaves holes as it shrinks – which means that new information can enter the brain but is soon lost, flowing out like sands of self through a proverbial mental sieve. This short-term memory loss is due to a combination of neurotransmitters that promote the exchange of messages between the brain’s nerve cells being depleted – and the atrophy of the hippocampus, the region of the brain responsible for storing memories. In dementia and Alzheimer’s memories are lost in reverse order recent memories disappear from conscious recall much quicker than those formed many years ago.

Reminisce meaning