Hello: I have a friend who is 96, and, remarkably, sound of mind and body. But he must care for his wife, who is disabled and has a memory span of about 15 seconds. Though a sweet and gentle soul, she will ask again and again "Ed, who is this man?" And increasingly, tragically, "Ed, what should I do?" Often she is content to sit with the cat in her lap and watch the squirrels in the back yard. But if there is nothing to hold her attention there, or at night, she more often becomes upset. I am wondering if a tape of fractals might be the answer, a reasonable depth of the Julius Set, candy cane tentacles reaching down infinitely to the sea and cycling slowly through colors, with the palette changed every 30 seconds or so. You will remember when you or your friends first saw this how intensely fascinating it was, and how you wanted to watch for hours (probably plunging deeper, of course, as you grew tired of one picture and wanted another.) Often I glanced up to find it was 3 a.m. Of course we grow tired of it sooner or later. But for a person without a memory, every cycle would be the joy of the first instant of discovery. And remember that such a person is otherwise normal -- she or he has the full capacity for amazement. So we might hope to sit such a person in front of a six-hour videotape of moving fractals and have them watch all day in fascination. And the next day and the next, never tiring. To an extent it seems we're cheating them, but in fact the sadness of their condition comes from the disease not the repetition of the fractals (which is no more than the repetition of the birds in the back yard.) Two questions then: 1. Does anyone know if this has been tried, and with what result? 2. Is there a good commercial tape, a calm one (certainly not psychedelic or frightening)? Or would someone make one for this experiment? (Perhaps just an hour for the first try.) I would myself but just taping the screen with a video camera gets those darn horizontal lines due to the unequal frame rate or whatever it is. This is a somewhat long shot but with four million Alzheimer's victims in the U.S. alone it would be wonderful if it worked, and it might bring great joy into lives otherwise very joyless. Any help appreciated, Alan Mole Ramole@aol.com