I Remember Better When I Paint
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The people you see here, at the museum, at the circus, or at a painting workshop, people who appear so together, so alive and focused, are in fact dealing with serious memory problems.
They have lost many of their cognitive skills. They are living with Alzheimer's disease.
Their involvement with the arts and other creative activities is now being recognized as a way to help bring them back into more active communication and a richer quality of life.
Dr. Robert C. Greene, Professor of Neurology & Genetics, Boston University
Alzheimer's disease does not affect the entire brain all at once. It seems to selectively start in the parts of the brain that are important for laying down new memory.
Dr. Sam Gandy, Associate Director, Mount Sinai Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, NYC
But there are parts of the brain that are involved much later that are really involved in creativity.
There is a part of the brain called the "Parietal Lobe" which is involved with Alzheimer's, but rather late. And that part of the brain is stimulated through creative activities like art and music.
Tony Jones, Chancellor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
You bring a person who is suffering, perhaps, from Alzheimer's and you put them in front of a painting. Somehow, the painting says something to them - about its scale, about the color, about the vibrancy of the picture. Somehow, they begin to have a dialogue with the picture.
Art Museum Participant #1:
Compared to her, the Mona Lisa is a shrew.
Participant # 2:
Really?
Participant #1:
I think so. Anyway, she has a face you can always trust. She's got something.
Participant # 2:
Innocence.
Participant # 1:
Yes, innocence.
Narrator:
We traveled to some of the best residents and day care centers in the United States and Western Europe, where the creative arts are integrated into the daily activities of the people living with Alzheimer's.
Judy Holstein, Director, CJE Senior Life Day Service, Chicago
We know that they take in color, form, shape, and they process it in some way that is real, that is in the moment. It translates in an Alzheimer's person's brain to have some meaning.
The creative arts are an avenue to tap into a non-verbal, emotional place in a person.
When they are given paint, markers, any kind of media for art making, and their hands are involved, and their muscles are involved, things are tapped in them that are genuine and active and alive. So the creative arts bypass the limitations and they simply go to the strengths.
People still have imaginations intact, all the way to the very very end of their progressive disease.
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I Remember Better When I Paint
A film by Eric Ellena & Berna Huebner
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