Some of us are old enough to remember when calculators first appeared. Many people decried the loss of mental arithmetic skills that were entailed in the constant use of those now-ubiquitous devices. In the same way, when your phone can remember all your favourite numbers, and your computer all the many details of daily life, to a large extent we no longer need to remember many things. We just need to know how to find them.
Some things though - like where you live and what your car (or partner) look like, are vitally important. And these are often lost in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Very early in the onset of the disease though, new research indicates that it becomes hard for sufferers to prioritise information - to sift the wheat from the chaff and concentrate on what it is important to remember and what can safely be forgotten. The paper, published in the May 2009 issue of Neuropsychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association, found that the Alzheimer's groups were significantly less efficient than their healthy age peers at remembering items according to their value.
The researchers speculate that people with early-stage Alzheimer's might remember important information better by learning to be more strategic and selective when encoding the most useful information, even though it comes at the expense of less-important information. They believe that improved memory training, emphasizing the relative importance of pieces of data and including strategies for prioritising these, may help reduce this symptom in the early stages of the disease.
Read more on HeWeHap about Alzheimer’s Disease