Sensory Challenges

Living with Dementia is far more than memory loss. Indeed for some of us memory loss is trivial. The challenge we all face every day is more to do with how we experience the world though our senses.

All forms of Dementia are progressive degenerative diseases of the brain, resulting in significant cognitive decline. Put simply our brains are slowly being eroded away. We rely on our brains to interpret the information our senses send to us to interpret the world. Likewise our brains send information via our nervous systems to all parts of our bodies to allow us to interact and communicate with the world.

If one small part of our brain is compromised by these degenerative diseases, say the primary gustatory cortex (responsible for the perception of taste) in extreme cases we may loose our ability to taste, but most likely experience a distorted sense of taste. This impact could then be compounded when our brains are combining all our sensory information to interpret the world. In this case it could mean our senses of smell and taste don’t ‘line up’ and we experience some confusion.

Following are a series of blog entries themes around our Sensory Challenges. Keep tuned as they will grow as inspiration grows.