EMOTIONS, MEMORY AND ALZHEIMER

Our brain is a wonderful machine which is in a constant production. It creates images, colours, feelings, etc. All our perceptions belong to the nervous system and provide it nutrition. One image can provoke biological changes. It can generate the production of serotonin, adrenaline, noradrenaline … millions of molecules. Painting, music, writing (as a visual communication through symbols previously agreed on), are nothing more than a game that combines physical and chemical processes of the brain in order to see, listen and smell, and thus to gain memories and emotions. Neuroscientists are showing (by means of reporting directly from brain activities with techniques of the neuroimage), that by stimulating the fields of perception the chemical process in our brain is activated.

In the 19^th century, based on the studies of James and Lange, the proposition was raised that in our memory the different kinds of behaviour are recorded and they evoke according to the function of our felt emotions. Hence, an extraordinary and fascinating path opens up and where neuro-scientific investigations are contributing some light.

Antonio Damasio, an excellent neurologist and a researcher in the neurobiology of emotions and feelings, and a winner of the Prince of Asturias Awards for Technical and Scientific Research in 2005, wrote in his book Looking for Spinoza: “Emotions play out in the theatre of the body. Feelings play out in the theatre of the mind.” He adds that memory, emotions and the language, are factors that make the human organism and its brain to be unique and especial.

We know what the Alzheimers disease implies for the patient, family and the society, and the difficulty of facing, every day, a loved one who we see and considers us as strangers. But we also know that the patients, already advanced in the disease, are able to express their emotions responding to many stimulants and are able to, in a certain way, remember. What happens in their brain? A way to verify it is to make a research, to measure what can improve the lives of the patients when, with different artistic-emotional stimulants, we try to make them remember and with the help of their emotions to feel better.

The AlzheimUr Foundation’s commitment and one of its principal aims is to carry out a research. A research that is not limited to clinical studies, new medicine or genetics, but is also social. In other words, it is a question of “weaving together” a commitment, integration between patients and their relatives together with society and the activities that the Foundation carries out. The aim of the research, in this case qualitative, is to prove that these activities that derive from the arts and are linked in a direct way to the emotions, can benefit the patients due to making them remember, as well as improving the patients’ self-confidence, their quality of life and of that of their relatives.

With this first activity, we embark on an original and affluent line of research. It represents a great opportunity and comprises great possibilities. We count on the patients and their self-sacrificing families, on the wonderful richness of human emotions that many know how to express in the multiple aspects of the arts, on the institutions that have supported us, on the society, their values and on an excellent and enthusiastic team with a high degree of professionalism. Without all these bodies, it would be impossible to carry out this, or any other, undertaking.

CARMEN ANTÚNEZ, directress of the Dementia Unit at the University Hospital “Virgen de la Arrixaca” in Murcia and Medical directress of the Alzheimer Foundation.