I receive daily emails from the Alzheimer's Daily News, a wonderful resource of research updates, and information and education on Alzheimer's Disease and other dementias.  The following article was in one of my emails this week, and I just had to pass along.  What are your thoughts?

Stay with me Today!
by Richard Taylor

"I think there is too much emphasis on helping people with dementia hang on to yesterday (something caregivers need) vs. helping people living with dementia being, understanding, and appreciating today (something all human beings, especially people living with failing cognitive skills need). We need less memory books and videos, and more cues, memory aids and support to know and understand what is going on around us and within us today.

So what if we forget a 1,000 times a day? We still need to live in it. We still need to understand it and feel a sense of ownership of it. Otherwise, what is left for our minds to work on, to understand - yesterday? Twenty or fifty years ago?

It takes more time to enable and support us with our struggle to understand today. And it takes increasingly more time and effort to support our need and want to stay in today. Helping us hang onto yesterday requires less time. Make us a book of family photos, put a shadow box outside our room with things from our past in it, give us some old dolls or clothes to fondle or wear - then leave us alone, go about the rest of your day.

The emphasis on memories and yesterdays unintentionally tells our ever-confused hippocampus to focus on the past and pay less attention to today. Today seems to take care of itself as far as we are concerned. Other people make decisions for us, lay out our clothes, dress and wash us, take us to the bathroom, buy our groceries, cook for us, and keep calling us inquiring what they can do for us that we haven't or can't do for ourselves today. So why not spend some time relaxing and drifting out of today and listening to old tunes, watching old movies, talking about the past and let today take care of itself?

Regardless of how many plaques and tangles we each have in our respective brains we are all still what we think we are (Rene Descartes was right, sort of). Think about yesterday and guess who you are? When others around you treat you as if you were simply a carbon copy of yesterday or the past five or ten or twenty years, when others see us as evolving and growing old as they see themselves evolving and growing old, they are naturally inclined to see in us their own need to enjoy the past, but live in the present. They sometimes escape to the past to avoid the problems of today, but then they must return to today. There is no pressure on us to return to today, because there is less and less need for us to return.

Not so!

Spend more times thinking of creative ways to support and enable us to stay in today, to understand what is happening around and to us, to structure activities so we must make our own decisions - today!

"Make it so." Please!"