Can People Feel What They Can't Remember?

Mrs. D can’t remember that her grandchildren just visited her yet her spirits are unusually high and she retains a glow. Mrs. P struggles to remember what day it is but put her favorite music on and she lights up and sings along with it.

Memory does become less reliable as we age, but memory loss seems to get a bad rap. Certainly it is troublesome to those experiencing it and perhaps even more so to those around. As a society, we seem to accept physical ailments more easily than mental ones. Our minds are supposed to stay intact. According to a 2010 survey, people over 55 dread getting Alzheimer’s more than any other disease.

Margaret Gullette, a prominent writer on issues of aging, describes our worrying about memory loss as “a national pastime”. She notes that “this epidemic of anxiety around memory loss is so strong that many older adults seek help for the kind of day-to-day forgetfulness that was once considered normal.” She also points to the upside: forgetting old rancors.

Many assume memory loss means loss of function and emotion. After all, if you can’t remember an experience, how can you retain its impact on you? Yet researchers are finding the opposite. Recent research on recall suggests that people who have difficulties with short-term memory are able to retain the emotions they experienced that accompanied an event even when they cannot remember the event.

If you have a happy encounter with someone who is labeled as demented, that person may forget that you visited but retain a happy feeling for some time. This means that phone calls and visits to a loved one with failing memory can really matter, even if the person doesn’t remember that the call or visit happened.

Music also triggers emotions and memories. We all know how songs from our youth can transport us back to a particular time and place. Those who work with folks with Alzheimer’s often respond to music but only recently have researchers begun to understand how that works.

Petr Janata, associate professor of psychology at UC Davis’ Center for Mind and Brain, demonstrated scientifically that music brings back memories. He then studied why this happens and found that the front of the brain where memories are supported and retrieved is the same place that links music, memories and emotions. Because this part of the brain is one of the last areas to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease and presumably other forms of memory loss, music is powerful therapy.

This helps explain why we at Stevenson House see such joy when seniors get together to sing.

A geriatric social worker I recently met reminded me of the following important insight: Forgetfulness is a relative notion that affects only certain parts of the brain, and certainly not the heart.