What We Remember

Last Saturday the daughter of one of our residents took her out shopping.

When they returned, the daughter told me about it.

They were shopping for new clothes. Her Mom found some clothes she really liked and tried them on.

Then she started strutting around saying something odd.

“I’m as cool as Duncan Campbell.”

At first the daughter thought it was just gibberish caused by dementia. Then she pulled out her phone and did some research.

Turns out Duncan Campbell was a minor league baseball player from Nicaragua. He made it to the minor leagues in the United States and had a shot at the big league (Major League Baseball).

He played with the likes of Pete Rose in the minor leagues in the late 50’s and early 60’s.

The Mom grew up in Nicaragua. A sports star making it to the US at the time was a BIG DEAL in the small country.

What’s really interesting is that her daughter said she had never heard her mother talking about Duncan Campbell before. It was really interesting that although she has trouble recalling recent events, she could remember a sports star from her distant past.

Turns out there’s a lot of science behind it. They call it the ‘Reminiscence Bump’.

The bump is an increased proportion of memories from people’s teenage and early adult years in people over age 40.

Many of the memories come from around ages 15 to 30. The memories often come back based on cues:

• Cue words

• Specific requests for memories

• Different smells

• Pictures or other visual stimuli

• Music or other sounds

We’ll often play music in our assisted living homes from bygone eras and when our residents were in that age range. Sometimes the residents will start singing the lyrics of the song despite their dementia.  It helps to calm their anxiety as they suddenly have something they can recognize.

There are many theories as to why people with dementia (and regular older people) can remember these memories well. Especially since more recent memories can be more challenging,

And creating new memories can be REALLY challenging or impossible.

The most popular theory I found to explain this is there is a lot of recent memories are stored in the hippocampus, part of the medial temporal lobe. The hippocampus also helps people process new information. When someone has Alzheimer’s or dementia, the hippocampus becomes damaged and may even shrink.

Longer term memories move over to other parts of the brain such as the neocortex, which seems to be spared at least in the early phases of the disease.

Caregivers can use the reminiscence bump to improve the mood of people with dementia. It can calm anxiety and darn it - people with dementia like it. Heck lots of people like to reminisce about their youth regardless of their mental condition.

Just talk to most men about how much better they were back then!