All my well-worn routines have changed – from my morning walk to my local coffee shop – and now I don’t really know who I am, or how to behave
I love reading about pandemic brain fog because it gives me an excuse for my current stupidity. It is pleasant to think that my inability to recall the dog’s name or what I did for the past hour are symptoms of a global malaise, rather than of my mental decline. That is not to say that I am not getting stupider – I definitely am – but it’s nice to pretend something else is at work.
The most recent piece I read emphasised the impact of the lack of new experiences. We have “evolved to stop paying attention when nothing changes” and the sameness of pandemic days is unhelpful for “pattern separation”, one of the key processes in encoding memories.
