Question: can you explain to me more about your experiment with the memory and it being sponsered by the alzheimers soiety as my good friend has alzheimers

Michael Craig answered on 14 Mar 2013:

Hi Tilly,

Thanks for the question. That’s very sad to hear about your friend. I am funded by the Alzheimer’s Society to run research that could help people who suffer from the disease. Our work is still in its early stages but we have found that having a short rest (10 mins) after learning something new helps people to remember the new information when compared to performing some kind of activity during the 10 minutes after new learning. We have found this works for things such as lists of words and short stories and we are now trying to see if it works on more real life things. One of the experiments that I’m running is to see whether we can help people who have Alzheimer’s find their way through a new place back to where they came from. People with Alzheimer’s sometimes get lost, especially in new places and this can be very dangerous and confusing for them.

In the experiment we are using virtual reality (see the pic on my profile) where we ask them to walk through an environment following a certain route. After that they either have 10 mins of rest, or 10 mins doing some different activities e.g. spot the difference games. After the 10 mins we ask them to try and remember the route that they took through the environment and they have to try and not make any mistakes.

We’re finding that people who have 10 minutes of rest do a lot better than people who have 10 minutes of doing activities after learning. This is a really interesting finding and if we can replicate it in a real world situation rather than using virtual reality on computers it could have a massive impact on people who have Alzheiemer’s lives!

I hope that helps to answer your question, please let me know if you would like to know more.

Michael