Covid & Memory: Greetings From The Pandemic Memory Hole, Where The Last 2 Years Are One Big Blur
- Washington Post, Jan. 20, 2022. Ed. -Some people have forgotten birthdays. Others have lost much more. -
Even the memory of the time she forgot how old she was has gotten a little murky for Lauren Bendik in LA. “So, I’m trying to remember.” “Um. I feel like there was a form, or there was something I was filling out, and I had to put down my age, and I had to think about it.” She was 31, right? No, she was 32. Right. There had been 2 listless pandemic birthdays that had blurred into one, because 2 years have blurred into one, and it can be hard to pull them apart. “I think I, in general, have a pretty good memory in terms of time & events and how long ago things were." But the days have all been the same, especially after last spring when she was laid off from her job as a social worker.
Since then, “There’s nothing to mark the time, and you don’t know when the pandemic is going to end.” “You feel like you’re waiting for something, but it’s never coming.”
For 28-year-old Gabriela Barge, a high-end-wedding planner, 2019 still feels like “last year.” Some of her clients have rescheduled their weddings 3 times now, meaning she has planned celebrations for the same couples in 2020, 2021 and now, 2022. “I have no landmarks that kind of show me, time-wise, where we’re all at,” she says. In spring 2020, Alexandra Lange had been working on her book, “Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall,” when the virus hit, forcing her to cancel a research trip. The pandemic sent both her book project and shopping malls into suspended animation — what Lange calls an “in-between space.” She was finally able to visit American Dream Mall more than a year later, in May 2021.
The virus was on the wane, but its impact made things seem precarious inside the mall. Many stores still hadn’t reopened. When she wrote the experience into her book, she accidentally dated her visit as May 2020. It felt “like it happened in this amorphous time that could be 2020, could be 2021,” she says now. “It just didn’t register it as wrong.” Almost nobody noticed the mistake.. For those who have continued to keep their normal lives somewhat on hold, it seems to be getting worse as we begin a 3rd lap around the half-empty mall of memory and experience. A study released in September 2021 of 150 female first-year psychology students at an Italian university found a significant decrease in both working memory and prospective memory during the pandemic. The condition of some people’s recent memories- smudged, shuffled- is not surprising to psychologists who study how memories are formed.
"Distinctiveness improves memory,” says Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychology professor. But when every day feels the same- we lose our ability to distinguish between events, impairing our ability to make memories. “We’re not segmenting those events, separating them from one another, making them distinct from one another.” “So that really sets the stage for what we might think of as more muddled remembering.” There’s the effects of pandemic life, and then there’s the effects of the virus itself. Chimére Smith says she used to have a photographic memory until she developed covid in March 2020. She was never hospitalized and never even had a fever, but soon found herself reeling from debilitating memory lapses and brain fog...
More, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/01/20/pandemic-memory-covid-2020-2021-2022
= new reply since forum marked as read
you may have more problems than a pandemic
I've never had a birthday party in my life but I know how old I am. 
