I find that in the working world, success is often about skewing the situation in your favor and playing to your strengths. Whether it is calling a meeting in the morning because you’re sharper then than in the drowsy afternoon, or only communicating through email and letters so you want to avoid having to think on our feet (perhaps not your best cognitive skill!).

Since no one is cognitively perfect, it’s no surprise that we’ve all dabbled in this all of our lives. Such “cognitive coping skills” are the methods we use to stay in the game, protect our dignity, avoid embarrassment, retain control over our lives for as long as we can, and maintain as much of our sense of ourselves as we possibly can.

Charles Darwin, naturalist and author of "The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection"

I think it’s easy to construe such coping skills as games people play, but they’re not. They are a result of the competition and natural selection that drive us at the very core of our being–yup, the stuff Darwin was talking about. Our nature is to keep moving so we can keep up with the pack. Coping skills of the kind I mean are part and parcel of our arsenal of how we do that.

For example, people who are illiterate, or even functionally so, have brains that work overtime assessing every possible clue in front of them—beyond the words they cannot read—to get through life successfully regardless of their inability to read. That’s work!

So it is the case with people struggling with progressive dementia. And when you are charged with helping someone with dementia, you come to learn a lot about his or her cognitive coping skills.

For example, sometimes Harry, the volunteer game-tester I work with three times a week, reads each of the possible answers out loud, waiting for me to confirm the correct one: “Is it Frank Sinatra? Is it Dean Martin? Is it Sammy Davis, Jr.? What do you think?” I don’t look at this as Harry trying to finagle the answer out of me so much as his effort to gracefully make his way through this very difficult moment with his dignity intact—he’s asking me to partner with him and share some of the responsibility for deciding on the answer.

Now, I could just go with that and give him the answers, but I also know that HE knows NOT earning the answers for himself doesn’t make him feel very good. So my job is to get him beyond those cognitive coping skills and help him actually work through the games in a way that gives his brain as rigorous a workout as he can handle on that day–while avoiding frustration and maintaining his dignity.

If I’m on my toes, whatever coping skill Harry lobs my way, I can turn it into an opportunity for him to figure out the answer himself. It helps that a nice feature of the Dakim BrainFitness System is that it always gives you one freebie guess that, if you guess wrong, doesn’t count against your score. So, whatever answer option Harry is pointing at on that first try, right or wrong, I encourage him by simply saying, “Give it a shot.”

(Many times, I use that first try to see what kind of a mood Harry is in that day. As I mentioned in my last blog post, if he begins stabbing all the buttons without thinking about it, I know he’s feeling impatient, frustrated, or both. If he pauses after making an incorrect guess, I know he is feeling confident enough to really try again.)

If he guesses wrong on that first try (AND is in the mood to figure things out!), that’s when the real work begins. I start by giving him hints—anything I can think of that can spur on his brain to dig for the answer:

• Giving him the first letter of the word he needs to figure out
• Drawing a picture either as a hint or just giving him something visual that he can put a name to
• Asking the question in a different way (our work in this area has helped my team a lot in reworking HOW we ask questions!)
• Providing various specific descriptions of the answer – if the answer is “horse,” I’ll provide something like: “It has four legs”; “It’s feet are hoofs”; “it eats grass”; “They’re also called ‘ponies’”; “Three kinds of them are pintos, mustangs, and palominos”; and “They run very fast”
• Describing some context around the answer, like “You saddle it up and ride it”; “Cowboys ride them”; and “People watch them race in the Kentucky Derby”
• Urging him to say things out loud because sometimes, even hearing part of a word he’s trying to spell can kick in the memory of the whole word.
• If the answer is really multiple right answers, encouraging him to scan all the options and see if any of them just “calls out to him, ‘Pick me!’” (My theory behind this is that sometimes it seems like the answer is floating around in his head and he just needs to trust his gut to act on even a glimmer of recognition of a picture or word.)

Any one of these kinds of devices just might be THE one that triggers his memory or gives his critical thinking skills a foothold in finding the answer. Most importantly, these are ways I can slide Harry closer to finding the answer himself—and ultimately, every question he answers correctly or puzzle he solves on his own, to whatever degree he can, adds to his confidence and lets us still see more of the Harry we know.

ALL of what I’ve just discussed is brain exercise, by the way. Even if Harry can’t figure out the correct answer outright, he still has to chew on all those hints and clues I’m giving him and work his brain toward the answer. And if he is more in the mood to try to finagle answers out of me? Well, all the thinking he has to do to accomplish that is still a lot of brain work!