Name: 【TEDx】Alzheimer and memory palaces: Kasper Bormans at TEDxLeuven
Uploaded: 2015-04-29T13:02:45.000Z
Duration: 11 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Imagine you had to select 10 to 20 ideas  you would like to remember the longest.

What would they be?  And is there some sort of mental locker,

So, when our memory crashes,  is there a black box?

is that when we want  to keep something in mind,

we do exactly the opposite:  we put it out of the mind, by externalizing it.

For example, yesterday I received  over 100 messages saying 'Happy Birthday!',

but these messages do no longer  touch my heart as they used to.

is that all my friends are using iPhones  and Facebook to remember me.

But in us is the desire to be recognized  and to be remembered.

Mutual recognition defines the difference

between talking to a loved  one and talking to a stranger.

Now I'd like you to visualize the house you call home.

Walk around in it.  Probably there are several rooms

and several objects related to persons  you care about.

Let me show you what Alzheimer's does  at the end stage.

Scientists estimate that over  a 100 million people on this planet

And more than half of them aren't even aware of it.

People in the early phase of Alzheimer's disease

have particular sensitivity with the problem  of retrieving proper names,

making it hard and difficult to recognize  and remember their significant others.

Now I was wondering: if [we] are willing  to carve the names of our loved ones

in the bark of a tree,  can we do that to the bark of our brain?

A while ago, I was sitting in a large audience.

I was listening to a communications expert.

He was also a CEO of a large advertising company.

He said something that really hit me in the face.

Sometimes you have these moments  that you absorb an idea.

He said, "The goal of our communication  is to anchor or attach the message

in the long term memory of our consumers."

you cannot buy a product you forgot the name of.

But I was thinking:  can we use these techniques

to place something more valuable in the minds of others

rather than a redundant need  or a useless brand name?

With this in mind,  I went to some researchers

They are specialized in quality of life and communication strategies regarding Alzheimer's.

They said to me, "It's about time  individuals like you stand up

and tell a positive story in a negative world.

So they inspire me as a doctoral researcher

That's the reason why I stand here today.

was an old man,  he was about 80 years old.

His wife was sitting next to him,  covered in tears.

I asked the man, "If you look at this picture,

who is this woman,  and what does she mean to you?"

With the most neutral face,  he said to me,

Can we change that?  Can we do something about this?

She's about 50 and she lost her son  during a car crash.

This tree is located on the road  this woman had to drive

she was crying,  because it reminded her of her son.

Now can we use this mechanism  for something positive?

to make it easier for an early Alzheimer's

Because what this woman is actually doing,  is building a memory palace,

or, as it is referred to, the method of loci.

I'd like to take you through it  in 3 simple steps.

First, you have to select and memorize  a series of distant loci or locations

In our case, the familiar pathway will be

the house the early Alzheimer's currently lives in.

In a second phase, you have to create  interactive images along,

that represent the stimuli  you would like to remember.

In a third and final phase,  you place these interactive images

along the loci you selected in the first place.

Now, before I destroyed this scale model,  I worked together with an architect

to work on a prototype  of a memory palace in 3D,

The ambition of our project  is to enhance memory for familiar faces

for people in the early phase  of Alzheimer's disease.

By that we hope to improve  the quality of life,

not only for the patient but also  for their significant others.

Most early Alzheimer's still live on their own.

Therefore, professional architects  will use the construction plans

of the houses they currently live in  to make virtual scale models,

resulting in an externalized and customized,  tailor-made memory palace.

It's a recent trend to use virtual reality  not only for computer games,

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【TEDx】Alzheimer and memory palaces: Kasper Bormans at TEDxLeuven

mental

scale

life

impact