Native Gaelic speakers with dementia are being helped to recall memories through conversations in the language with school children.
This makes me so happy, especially because not only does it keep one of the Gaelic community’s most important cultural activities alive, i.e. the cèilidh – in other words meeting people in order to exchange stories, memories and songs – but it’s also helping to keep the language and its different traditional dialects alive through a brilliant example of intergenerational language transmission.
Suas leis ar cànan.
Tag: memory
Depressive thoughts affect memory
For people with depressed mood, memory and concentration difficulties are often a day-to-day reality, greatly affecting job performance and personal relationships. While those with the disorder report that these cognitive problems are some of the most deeply troubling, previous studies have been unable to observe this phenomenon in a laboratory setting. In a study published online in Cognition and Emotion, researchers at the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas are the first to substantiate memory deficits in individuals with depressed mood. The findings may have implications for the way cognitive deficits are diagnosed and treated in depression.
In the study, individuals with depressed mood show as much as a 12% reduction in memory compared to individuals without depressed mood when depressive thoughts are present, but perform similarly to individuals without depressed mood when depressive thoughts are not present. “The results suggest that individuals with and without depressed mood generally have a similar ability to actively remember information. However, when depressive thoughts are present, people with depressed mood are unable to remove their attention from this information, leading to deficits in their memory,” explained Nicholas Hubbard, the study’s lead author and a doctoral candidate at the Center for BrainHealth under Bart Rypma, Ph.D.
“Depression is an interference phenomenon. Rumination and negative thought-loops interfere with a person’s ability to think. We hypothesize that when individuals with depressed mood are exposed to stimuli, such as a meaningful song or a place that evokes sad feelings, the brain fixates on that and can’t focus on daily tasks such as a phone conversation or completing a grocery list,” explained Dr. Rypma, Meadows Foundation Chair and Associate Professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. “In a traditional laboratory setting, external cues that induce depressive thoughts and therefore interfere with cognitive performance are eliminated. In our study, we found a way to incorporate them and observe their effects on memory.”
(please click the link for the complete article)
Holding the Bowl 