BOSTON: In her very first research project at Dublin’s Trinity College, Dr Irish discovered soothing, familiar music such as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is helpful in rehabilitating memory in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
Since then she has explored memory structures in the brain and has demonstrated that damage caused by different types of dementia can affect the brain’s ability to retrieve information.
Her research has also identified which parts of the brain are necessary for imagining future events such as our next holiday or remembering to take our wallet and keys when leaving the house.
Her study was the first to show dementia patients don’t just lose their ability to remember the past.
“One of my most important findings is to demonstrate patients with dementia cannot imagine their future,” she says.
“We need memory to help us plan, adapt, anticipate and imagine our future.”
“If patients are unable to project forward in time they may be unable to consider outcomes of their actions and experience lapses in perspective memory — perhaps forgetting to take medication or forgetting to take the kettle off the stove — things that can have serious consequences in their daily lives”…