Readers Historiophiliac and Paper Lions passed along a neat article to me a little bit ago. It’s about something called The Baseball Reminiscence Program, which is aimed at helping adults with dementia better connect with their friends and loved ones by talking about baseball.
The program, launched by a University of Connecticut professor and researcher named Michael Ego, gets patients suffering from dementia to talk about baseball. It’s one of many other sorts of reminiscence therapies aimed at getting patients to talk about familiar subjects as a means of stimulating them and helping them to strengthen brain connections. It could be art, it could be music, it could be history. The key is that it’s a topic that delves into deeper, more firmly-rooted memories and areas of knowledge which are less vulnerable to the ravages of dementia. Baseball is a thing most of us are introduced to when we’re young. As such, it’s the sort of thing over which Ego’s patients can bond.
The group has made outings to Citi Field to watch the Mets and ESPN has visited their sessions and will do a story about it soon.
Neat stuff.