Why Time Capsules are Great for Dementia Related Charities |NotForgotten

Billions of people are impacted by charities everyday. There are more meaningful donations you can give than just a check.

Charity is defined as “the voluntary giving of help, typically in the form of money, to those in need.” Even though the world we live in is overall getting healthier and wealthier, there are always going to be people in need and charities give those who are more fortunate a structured way to give help. There is an overall satisfaction that comes from giving for both the giver and the receiver. No act of kindness goes unnoticed. It is hard to write about charities without sounding like an inspirational speaker, but all the sayings are true! By helping just one person you are making a difference.

If you have not read my past blogs, you should know that a common trend threaded throughout each one is that humans ultimately rely on each other. Whether it be for advice, history, the truth, memories…they all come from what we give one another. This is all especially relevant in this blog when it comes to charities.

You might be surprised by just how many Americans are impacted by the dementia related diseases which charities support. For example in 2020, as many as 5.8 million Americans were living with Alzheimer’s disease. The number of people living with the disease doubles every 5 years beyond the age of 65. This number is projected to nearly triple to 14 million people by 2060. Triple to 14 million! Can you believe that? I know it’s easy to get lost in all the numbers, but each and every number represents a person.

One of those families impacted by this awful disease are the Gallagher’s in the UK. Leah Gallagher is a client of NotForgotten, a time capsule company that stores memories digitally for up to 300 years. Alzheimer’s runs in Leah’s family. Her reasoning for making a time capsule was mainly for herself. She did not want to forget the precious years of her youth. Leah wanted to make sure she would be able to look back and remember all the good times she had.

“I want to be able to look back at who I was and how I’ve grown, and I am quite into self reflection. So I have done NotForgotten as a self reflection and to be able to give a little present to myself when I am 80.”

Memory is about the past. It is your personal database of things you have experienced. Like old photographs, everyone’s memories fade, and worse — they fade quickly. We all know it’s harder to remember things from a long time ago compared to more recent events. But memory rot (degradation) actually starts to happen immediately following an event. People remember visual scenes, but the vibrancy of recall dims in just a few minutes.

Memories are important to us as a species — they are used to help us PLAN. Being able to picture the past enables us to imagine the future, and therefore plan — one of the complex cognitive feats that stands humans apart from many other species.

So why then do we lose our memories? … Most adults suffer from childhood amnesia ie not being able to remember their first 3 1/2 years. But as we age, health, education, outliving our brains (simple wear and tear if you’d like) and of course disease are all factors that destroy our memories.

“As we age our bodies simply aren’t adapted to living quite as long as we do” says Aoife Kiely from UK charity the Alzheimer’s Society. “the neurons you are born with are pretty much the ones you are going to live your whole life with”, she says. “It is certainly an issue of wear and tear of the brain.” As we age, we lose many of the connections between these neurons, and immune cells in the brain can also begin to run amok.

But most notably, forgetting is a deliberate act on the part of our minds. Forgetting does not just happen by accident. Active processes in our brains are WORKING everyday hard to make us forget. But why should the brain invest energy in undoing its own memories? The issue isn’t storage space: given the number of cells and connections in the brain, there is reason to think we could remember much more than we do. The issue is that memories are designed to fade.

There are a number of reasons this happens:

1. The goal of memory is actually to optimize decision-making in the future. And its the act of purging our brains of most of our experiences that actually helps us learn important lessons and make better decisions. We need to be able to recall past events and preferences, so we can make sound decisions. This is because during the decision-making process, the brain uses previous choices and existing knowledge to assess options and imagine how they might turn out. By remembering instances when traffic was bad on your commute, for example, you would learn which times to avoid.
2. But we also need to have LESS memories to avoid the possibility of them all getting mixed up and interfering with each other. Having fewer memories can make it easier to spot important patterns that help us plan for the future. Remembering every single commute would make it impossible to identify such patterns.
3. Your brain needs to keep clean space available for the new important memories that help us make the better decisions that help us survive. If you are trying to store a whole lot of memories that are no longer useful, there’s a high risk that they will hamper the storage of new memories. Have you ever confused memories of two vacations that happened at the same place at different times?

So if the the goal of memory isn’t to store all information indefinitely and in the absence of the direct memories of our earliest years (childhood amnesia), then how do we create a personal autobiography of our lives?

Well, even when memories seem to have disappeared, they are often still lurking somewhere, it is just that we can’t or don’t retrieve them — until the right moment comes along.

Each memory is thought to be stored in an interconnected network of brain cells. To retrieve a memory, two things can trigger it

• you find some part of a memory’s content: for example, to recall who came to your last birthday party, you might start by picturing where the party took place.
• you hear a story: Children who remember their early childhood -those who overcome childhood amnesia - have often fashioned a memory into a good story, with a time and place and a coherent sequence of events. Those are the kinds of memories that are going to stick.

Time capsulers like Leah are smart. Alzheimer’s runs in her family and she is actively trying to remember the past by saving her content and telling her story. That’s because she knows that when her memories start to fail, she will need to rely on family members, their stories, photo albums and videos to restore them.

Digital time capsules are relatively new. Time capsules allow you to protect videos, voicemails, photos alongside your stories, they create the triggers needed for memory recall throughout a person’s life and they come with all the certainty that your memories will be safe and accessible that frankly, your mind cannot offer.

Time capsules are not just important for those with Alzheimer’s. They give people the chance to have the world remember them in the exact perspective they want to be seen. Capsules also give the chance to both give the advice one believes is necessary to be heard and most importantly, say goodbye.

Too often we take our sound minds and the living for granted and don’t expect the unexpected to happen. An example is Richie’s story. While in the process of making his father a time capsule with NotForgotten, he had a sudden passing. Richie was left caring for his mother who had Alzheimer’s and not enough representation of his father to show her. Richie explains that,

“I regret not doing it for my dad, and my mom has early onset Alzheimer’s, now I’m doing mine so my sons will have one of me. No matter what happens.”

Charity does not always have to come in the form of money. Gifts like Leah’s time capsule to herself hold so much hope and opportunity. There is no greater gift than memories for those with diseases like Dementia and Alzheimer's.

But time capsules contain a second gift …each time capsule will also create an important record of family history that can be rediscovered throughout the generations that is priceless and comforting to many families.

By making a time capsule, you are putting the memory of someone out there forever. What better way to gift someone than giving them the power to be remembered?

Onwards,

Mallory