What do you get when you cross an academic, a comedian, and one of Britain’s longest running and best-loved quiz shows?
The unlikely answer is: lessons for dementia care, according to a linguistics expert who has studied the winning tactics of contestants on Radio 4’s Just a Minute (JaM).
Cardiff University researcher Prof Alison Wray joined forces with deadpan comic Paul Merton on a paper for the journal, Comedy Studies, exploring how JaM’s guests manage the ‘brain fry’ cognitive overload of talking for 60 seconds without hesitation, repetition or deviation.
Wray analysed hundreds of hours of JaM recordings and found that the more players became anxious and frustrated, the more likely they were to make mistakes. Investing in the game, taking it too seriously, led to almost certain brain fry – mental fatigue or cognitive overload.
The key to success, Wray discovered, was to abandon any ambition of winning, and focus instead on making the show fun.
Merton should know – he won 12 episodes in a row without even trying. “Playing JaM is about making a good show, and that isn’t to do with how long you can talk for,” he writes in the study. “It doesn’t matter who wins, as long as we’ve jointly achieved that goal.
“It’s mind-boggling to think that my efforts to entertain the audience, both in the studio and at home, may well prove to be useful in studying brain fry or cognitive overload. By attempting to keep my contributions fresh, I suppose I may have unwittingly adopted a useful ploy in helping to keep the brain fresh as well.”
Wray likens JaM’s cognitive stress to the effects of dementia, and suggests the show offers pointers for managing the condition. “It’s not by any means an exact parallel, but we can certainly see that in both JaM and in dementia, the result of this brain fry is often frustration, anger, and loss of confidence,” she told Positive.
She suggests that people living with dementia, and others who interact with them, might find communication less stressful by shifting the focus away from delivering long sentences in a particular way, or getting bogged down by detail.
It’s not by any means an exact parallel, but we can certainly see that in both JaM and in dementia, the result of this brain fry is often frustration, anger, and loss of confidence
“Instead try to keep the interaction fun and enjoyable,” Wray notes. “Think about whether the details really matter for a story to be told successfully. If they’re not needed, why add to the pressure?”
A final lesson for cognitive health is buried in Wray’s study, and it comes from JaM’s late, great host, Nicholas Parsons, who relished the weekly mental workout of chairing the show. “The more you use your brain, the younger you remain,” he once wrote.
Main image: Paul Merton
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