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612-624-9839
cla@umn.edu
612-624-9839
Stories, Rhymes and Memory
by Joel Hoekstra
Mary Kennedy
Photo by Bridget Brown
Mary Kennedy
Assistant professor, speech-language-hearing sciences
Education
Ph.D., University of Washington, Seattle
M.A., B.A., California State University, Fullerton
At home she likes to…
Read. Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger, is her latest find. But most fiction will satisfy.
Listen to music. “I used to play piano. Music is a big part of my life.”
Garden. “I grow perennials. The philosophy of a perennial garden is that you share plants with your neighbors. It's a way of being friendly. People stop by to ask about a particular variety.”
On Minnesota students:
“Many of my students—even freshmen—already have a solid background in science. I’m impressed with their knowledge. I don't have to go back and cover the fundamentals.”
Memorable experience
“At 17, I went to the Middle East with my mother on a church-sponsored trip. We visited Israel, Turkey, and Greece. I had never been outside the United States, and seeing all these historic sites was over-whelming. It's such a rich part of the world.”
Professor Mary Kennedy thinks telling stories may lessen the problems of memory loss among head-injury patients.
Ask people to name their favorite kind of movie and most will cite such categories as adventure, drama, horror, comedy, Western, mystery, or satire. But Mary Kennedy selects another genre: films about cognitive impairments.
Slim pickings, you say? Hardly. Popular films like Rainman, Forrest Gump, and Fifty First Dates center on characters whose cognitive abilities are somehow unreliable.
Kennedy, an assistant professor in the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, is particularly fond of Memento, which tells the story of a man with severe memory loss. In his attempts to avenge his wife's death, the man must rely on handwritten notes and other clues he's left for himself.
“The science in the film was very sound, and I think it accurately reflects the reality of what it must be like to live with a severe memory impairment,” Kennedy says.
Kennedy is particularly interested in how memory is affected by traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). TBIs, the result of a blow to the head, can result in confusion or loss of consciousness. But the damage—a sheering or stretching of the neurons—isn't always perceptible, even with modern brain-scanning technologies. Instead, it shows up in the behavior of the more than two million Americans living with TBIs, according to the national Brain Injury Association.
Every Good Boy Does Fine
Trained as a clinical speech pathologist, Kennedy has zeroed in on memory and communication in her research. Can language be a tool for lessening the memory problems caused by TBI?
Even people without head injuries use mnemonic devices to remember names and information. Rhymes help us remember grammatical lists. Acronyms prompt our recollection of long titles. A simple sentence helps us remember the music scale. We make up stories to remember details that would otherwise evaporate from memory.
People with TBI, Kennedy posits, may also benefit from experiments with such memory aids. Words, lists, and anecdotes could serve as rehabilitation tools.
Language and memory
Kennedy manages the U's NeuroCognitive Communication Lab, which examines the relationship between language and memory. Initially, she and several graduate students tested TBI patients for their ability to remember unrelated word pairs: “We found that it's difficult for people with TBIs to remember unrelated information,” Kennedy says. “But when that task is put into a story, it's a little easier.”
Kennedy and her team also measure metacognition—one's perception of one's own ability to remember things. It's important, she says, for TBI patients to assess their ability to remember things: Will they recall the item they need when they get to the grocery store? Will they remember a doctors' appointment scheduled for next week?
A better awareness of their own memory skills helps TBI patients to more reliably predict whether they'll remember details of a particular situation or task. Knowing that their memory is often faulty, they are more likely to use written notes or other aids to jog their memory.
Getting there
Kennedy's interest in communication and the brain first surfaced during her high school years in Santa Ana, Calif., when she worked as a part-time messenger at a hospital. “There was a young man close to my age who was there for several months. He was coming out of a coma. I would often talk to him to see if I could get him to respond,” Kennedy says.
Although Kennedy didn't see it, several nurses claimed the boy's eyes lit up when she passed by. “I was fascinated,” Kennedy says. “And I was drawn to being able to see if there was a way that I could help people like him.”
Initially, Kennedy trained as a speech pathologist and worked in several clinics. But she remained interested in the underpinnings of language and communication.
In the early 1990s, she took a course at the University of Washington from Thomas Nelson, a pioneer in the field of metacognition. “I went into the course thinking nobody can really measure this stuff. But I came out really excited. I thought that the methodology cognitive psychologists were using could be applied to tap into disorders that we couldn't previously describe.”
The work of Kennedy's lab is ultimately aimed at examining techniques that can be applied toward therapies. “Rehabilitation professionals, neuropsychologists, and speech language pathologists don't have a tool that taps into this metacognitive activity, which is an important element in everyday decision-making,” she explains.
“We want to make rehab activities as close to real-life encounters as we can.”
