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  [36]Health

Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain

  We have been doing this so long, we’re forgetting how to be normal.


   [37]Ellen Cushing

  March 8, 2021
  A pair of feet coming out of the water, against a foggy grey sky, and
  reflected in the water
  Peter Marlow / Magnum

  I first became aware that I was losing my mind in late December. It was
  a Friday night, the start of my 40-somethingth pandemic weekend: Hours
  and hours with no work to distract me, and outside temperatures
  prohibitive of anything other than staying in. I couldn’t for the life
  of me figure out how to fill the time. “What did I used to … do on
  weekends?” I asked my boyfriend, like a soap-opera amnesiac. He
  couldn’t really remember either.

  Since then, I can’t stop noticing all the things I’m forgetting.
  Sometimes I grasp at a word or a name. Sometimes I walk into the
  kitchen and find myself bewildered as to why I am there. (At one point
  during the writing of this article, I absentmindedly cleaned my glasses
  with nail-polish remover.) Other times, the forgetting feels like
  someone is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying
  everything loose. I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of
  a past life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can
  remember at all: What time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What
  does a bar smell like? Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a
  mustache? On what street was the good sandwich place near work, the one
  that toasted its bread? How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do
  people talk about when they don’t have a global disaster to talk about
  all the time? You have to wear high heels the whole night? It’s more
  baffling than distressing, most of the time.

Recommended Reading

    * [38]woman eating

[39]There’s No Real Reason to Eat 3 Meals a Day
      [40]Amanda Mull
    * [41]An illustration of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations
      overlaid on a photograph of a medical professional looking out a
      window.

[42]The Pandemic’s Future Hangs in Suspense
      [43]The COVID Tracking Project
    * [44]A person sits upside down on an amusement park ride, high in
      the air.

[45]A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer
      [46]James Hamblin

Recommended Reading

    * [47]woman eating

[48]There’s No Real Reason to Eat 3 Meals a Day
      [49]Amanda Mull
    * [50]An illustration of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations
      overlaid on a photograph of a medical professional looking out a
      window.

[51]The Pandemic’s Future Hangs in Suspense
      [52]The COVID Tracking Project
    * [53]A person sits upside down on an amusement park ride, high in
      the air.

[54]A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer
      [55]James Hamblin
    *

  Everywhere I turn, the fog of forgetting has crept in. A friend of mine
  recently confessed that the morning routine he’d comfortably maintained
  for a decade—wake up before 7, shower, dress, get on the subway—now
  feels unimaginable on a literal level: He cannot put himself back
  there. Another has forgotten how to tie a tie. A co-worker isn’t sure
  her toddler remembers what it’s like to go shopping in a store. The
  comedian Kylie Brakeman made [56]a joke video of herself attempting to
  recall pre-pandemic life, the mania flashing across her face: “You know
  what I miss, is, like, those night restaurants that served alcohol.
  What were those called?” she asks. “And there were those, like, big men
  outside who would check your credit card to make sure you were 41?”

  [57]Read: Sedentary pandemic life is bad for our happiness

  Jen George, a community-college teacher from Cape Elizabeth, Maine,
  told me she is losing her train of thought in the middle of a sentence
  more and more often. Meanwhile, her third grader, who is attending
  in-person school, keeps leaving his books, papers, and lunch at home.
  Inny Ekeolu, a 19-year-old student from Ireland, says she has found
  herself forgetting how to do things she used to do on a regular basis:
  swiping her bus pass, paying for groceries. Recently she came across a
  photo of a close friend she hadn’t seen since lockdown and found that
  she couldn’t recognize her. “It wasn’t like I had forgotten her
  existence,” she told me. “But if I had bypassed her on the street, I
  wouldn’t have said hi.” Rachel Kowert, a research psychologist in
  Ottawa, used to have a standing Friday-night dinner with her
  neighbors—and went completely blank when one of them recently mentioned
  it. “It was really shocking,” Kowert told me. “This was something I
  really loved, and had done for a long time, and I had totally
  forgotten.”

  This is the fog of late pandemic, and it is brutal. In the spring, we
  joked about the Before Times, but they were still within reach, easily
  accessible in our shorter-term memories. In the summer and fall, with
  restrictions loosening and temperatures rising, we were able to
  replicate some of what life used to be like, at least in an adulterated
  form: outdoor drinks, a day at the beach. But now, in the cold, dark,
  featureless middle of our pandemic winter, we can neither remember what
  life was like before nor imagine what it’ll be like after.

  To some degree, this is a natural adaptation. The sunniest optimist
  would point out that all this forgetting is evidence of the resilience
  of our species. Humans forget a great deal of what happens to us, and
  [58]we tend to do it pretty quickly—after the first 24 hours or so.
  “Our brains are very good at learning different things and forgetting
  the things that are not a priority,” Tina Franklin, a neuroscientist at
  Georgia Tech, told me. As the pandemic has taught us new habits and
  made old ones obsolete, our brains have essentially put actions like
  taking the bus and going to restaurants in deep storage, and placed
  social distancing and coughing into our elbows near the front of the
  closet. When our habits change back, presumably so will our recall.

  That’s the good news. The pandemic is still too young to have yielded
  rigorous, peer-reviewed studies about its effects on cognitive
  function. But the brain scientists I spoke with told me they can
  extrapolate based on earlier work about trauma, boredom, stress, and
  inactivity, all of which do a host of very bad things to a mammal’s
  brain.

  “We’re all walking around with some mild cognitive impairment,” said
  Mike Yassa, a neuroscientist at UC Irvine. “Based on everything we know
  about the brain, two of the things that are really good for it are
  physical activity and novelty. A thing that’s very bad for it is
  chronic and perpetual stress.” Living through a pandemic—even for those
  who are doing so in relative comfort—“is exposing people to microdoses
  of unpredictable stress all the time,” said Franklin, whose research
  has shown that stress changes the brain regions that control executive
  function, learning, and memory.

  That stress doesn’t necessarily feel like a panic attack or a bender or
  a sleepless night, though of course it can. Sometimes it feels like
  nothing at all. “It’s like a heaviness, like you’re waking up to more
  of the same, and it’s never going to change,” George told me, when I
  asked what her pandemic anxiety felt like. “Like wading through
  something thicker than water. Maybe a tar pit.” She misses the sound of
  voices.
  A boy drawing a face on a misted window with his finger Peter Marlow

  Prolonged boredom is, somewhat paradoxically, hugely stressful,
  Franklin said. Our brains hate it. “What’s very clear in the literature
  is that environmental enrichment—being outside of your home, bumping
  into people, commuting, all of these changes that we are collectively
  being deprived of—is very associated with synaptic plasticity,” the
  brain’s inherent ability to generate new connections and learn new
  things, she said. In the 1960s, the neuroscientist Marian Diamond
  conducted a series of experiments on rats in an attempt to understand
  how environment affects cognitive function. Time after time, the rats
  raised in “enriched” cages—ones with toys and playmates—performed
  better at mazes.

  Ultimately, said Natasha Rajah, a psychology professor at McGill
  University, in Montreal, our winter of forgetting may be attributable
  to any number of overlapping factors. “There’s just so much going on:
  It could be the stress, it could be the grief, it could be the boredom,
  it could be depression,” she said. “It sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it?”

  The share of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder,
  depressive disorder, or both roughly quadrupled from June 2019 to
  December 2020, [59]according to a Census Bureau study released late
  last year. What’s more, we simply don’t know the long-term effects of
  collective, sustained grief. Longitudinal studies of survivors of
  [60]Chernobyl, [61]9/11, and [62]Hurricane Katrina show elevated rates
  of mental-health problems, in some cases lasting for more than a
  decade.

  I have a job that allows me to work from home, an immune system and a
  set of neurotransmitters that tend to function pretty well, a support
  network, a savings account, decent Wi-Fi, plenty of hand sanitizer. I
  have experienced the pandemic from a position of obscene privilege, and
  on any given day I’d rank my mental health somewhere north of “fine.”
  And yet I feel like I have spent the past year being pushed through a
  pasta extruder. I wake up groggy and spend every day moving from the
  couch to the dining-room table to the bed and back. At some point night
  falls, and at some point after that I close work-related browser
  windows and open leisure-related ones. I miss my little rat friends,
  but I am usually too tired to call them.

  [63]Read: The most likely timeline for life to return to normal

  Sometimes I imagine myself as a Sim, a diamond-shaped cursor hovering
  above my head as I go about my day. Tasks appear, and I do them.
  Mealtimes come, and I eat. Needs arise, and I meet them. I have a
  finite suite of moods, a limited number of possible activities, a set
  of strings being pulled from far offscreen. Everything is
  two-dimensional, fake, uncanny. My world is as big as my apartment,
  which is not very big at all.

  “We’re trapped in our dollhouses,” said Kowert, the psychologist from
  Ottawa, who studies video games. “It’s just about surviving, not
  thriving. No one is working at their highest capacity.” She has played
  The Sims on and off for years, but she always gives up after a
  while—it’s too repetitive.

  Earlier versions of The Sims had an autonomous memory function,
  according to Marina DelGreco, a staff writer for Game Rant. But in The
  Sims 3, the system was buggy; it bloated file sizes and caused players’
  saved progress to delete. So The Sims 4, released in 2014, does not
  automatically create memories. PC users can manually enter them, and
  Sims can temporarily feel feelings: happy, tense, flirty. But for the
  most part, a Sim is a hollow vessel, more like a machine than a living
  thing.

  The game itself doesn’t have a term for this, but the internet does:
  “smooth brain,” or sometimes “head empty,” which I first started
  noticing sometime last summer. Today, the TikTok user @smoothbrainb1tch
  has nearly 100,000 followers, and stoners on Twitter are marveling at
  the fact that their “[64]silky smooth brain” was once capable of
  calculus.

  This is, to be clear, meant to be an aspirational state. It’s the step
  after [65]galaxy brain, because the only thing better than being a
  genius in a pandemic is being intellectually unencumbered by mass
  grief. People are celebrating “[66]smooth brain Saturday” and chasing
  the ideal summer vibe: “[67]smooth skin, smooth brain.” One
  [68]frequently reposted meme shows a photograph of a glossy, raw
  chicken breast, with the caption “Cant think=no sad ❤️.” This is
  juxtaposed against a biology-textbook picture of a healthy brain, which
  is wrinkled, oddly translucent, and the color of canned tuna. The
  choice seems obvious.

  Some Saturday not too long from now, I will go to a party or a bar or
  even a wedding. Maybe I’ll hold a baby, and maybe it will be heavy.
  Inevitably, I will kick my shoes off at some point. I won’t have to
  wonder about what I do on weekends, because I’ll be doing it. I’ll kiss
  my friends and try their drinks and marvel at how everyone is still the
  same, but a little different, after the year we all had. My brain won’t
  be smooth anymore, but being wrinkly won’t feel so bad. My synapses
  will be made plastic by the complicated, strange, utterly novel
  experience of being alive again, human again. I can’t wait.

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