Senior People Confronting Alzheimer Disease

Do you frequently forget where you kept your spectacles or what was it that you had in mind just a few minutes ago? Have you ever been made a joke for asking repeated questions in a gathering? Do you ever feel ashamed of yourself for forgetfulness? These are common incidents experienced by someone who may have an on-set of memory loss, or diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and ongoing treatment in Dubai.

Don’t let your weaknesses let you down. There’s always a way. Each brain has a different capacity. You may not be able to change your brain, but you surely can apply strategies to improve your memorization skills. You can literally trick your own brain to work just fine. Don’t know how? Here’s a brief explanation by our qualified Alzheimer’s disease treatment providers in Dubai.

Understanding the memory affected by Alzheimer’s disease

Our brains have a temporary storage bin for information, also known as the working memory. It consists of information required to complete specific tasks. According to Smith and Kossyln (researchers in cognitive psychology), working memory is like a blackboard, you can store any information you like, use it, and then erase it once it is used.

A common example of working memory is when we participate in a discussion and want to make a comment or share an experience, we have to wait until the person speaking completes so that we don’t interrupt someone else. We wait for a pause in the conversation to begin speaking with our thoughts, until then we listen to the discussion carefully along with keeping what we have to say in our mind. Recent studies have proved that working memory is largely affected and reduced by Alzheimer’s.

It is known that Alzheimer’s disease causes a decline in short term memory as well. While most people think working memory and short-term memory are the same thing, they are different. Working memory stores information that is to be used any time soon and doesn’t require to be remembered once used. On the other hand, short term memory consists of information that may not be practically used anytime soon, it is a set of information that may be deliberately remembered or maybe not. Alzheimer’s disease causes a short-term memory impairment which can cause people to forget questions they just asked or where they set their spectacles.

Fortunately, there are memory strategies that can be used to increase the capacity of the brain. These are some of the most common and effective strategies used by our Alzheimer’s disease treatment providers in Dubai:

  • Chunking
  • Attaching meaning
  • Repetition- when we repeat the same information over and over our brain shifts it into the long-term memory.

Chunking

Chunking is basically a technique which divides large parts of information into smaller units that makes it easy to remember. It groups related bits of information together and effectively reduces the number of “things” you need to remember. This technique proves to be highly effective and frequently used by centers providing Alzheimer’s disease treatment in Dubai.

We all use this method without realizing. How do you remember your phone number? Let’s say you’ve memorized it in groups of five, three and three digits, 09881-221-507. What if someone gives you the same numbers in different groupings? E.g., 09-8812-215-07, will you be able to recognize it at once? Probably not because you’ve memorized it in different chunks.

These are some of the techniques that can be used for chunking:

Acronyms (first letters)

Let’s say if you have to memorize the great lakes of North America, you can just remember HOMES

  • Huron
  • Ontario
  • Michigan
  • Erie
  • Superior

This will simplify multiple items to just one word.

Acrostics (made up phrases)

Never Eat Sour Watermelons
This phrase can be used to remember the points of a compass in clockwise order, North, East, South and West.

Associating concepts (mostly used to chunk down lists)

You can remember pancakes and burritos instead of remembering twelve ingredients and you can shop easily by recalling the recipe. In case you don’t know the recipe, you can pair similar things together like bread and butter, egg and milk, this makes it much easier to remember.

Power of purpose

Working with forgetfulness isn’t easy. It can be really frustrating as well as embarrassing. However, indulging yourself in pain and continuously living with all the negativities inside will only make things worse.

Doctor Patricia Boyle, from Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago, said: ‘Our study showed that people who reported greater purpose in life exhibited better cognition than those with less purpose in life even as plaques and tangles accumulated in their brains’.

These findings suggest that purpose in life protects against the harmful effects of plaques and tangles on memory and other thinking abilities’

You can either live your life in pain pitying yourself or give a purpose to your life, work towards your goals and keep looking for new strategies and ways to improve your memory. Just keep in mind, power lies in purpose. You aren’t weak if you have Alzheimer’s disease, but you are definitely weak if you lack purpose. Our training center will aid and influence your ongoing Alzheimer’s disease treatments in Dubai and prove to be the catalyst that you need to see impactful results of your medications and treatments. Join hands with Brainnovation – the brain training center that focuses on helping you find that purpose, and guide you through your journey hand in hand.