- Claudia Hammond
- BBC Future Network
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In November 2020, I wrote a close-up of people becoming more forgetful during the COVID-19 pandemic. I started this feature by quoting hearings. Someone told me that during the quarantine period, their memories often seemed to disappoint them.
In this report, I interviewed Catherine Loveday, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Westminster and a researcher on human memory. We discussed various factors that the epidemic may affect memory, but at that time there was no data to quantify how common this feeling of memory impairment is.
Now, thanks to Lofty, we have the data. She is currently preparing to publish her academic research results, but in the psychology program on BBC Radio 4 I hosted, she asked me to know a thing or two in advance.
In her research, Lofti used the “Everyday Memory Questionnaire” (Everyday Memory Questionnaire) to allow respondents to subjectively score their recent memory performance. Our knowledge of our own memory may be better than you think. The questionnaire will ask such questions:
- Have you forgotten to tell others important things?
- Have you ever planned to read a certain reading, but opened the book and found that you have already read it?
Regarding this study of people’s memory in the era of the new coronavirus pandemic, for each question, a questionnaire will ask the interviewees whether they think their memory has improved, remained the same, or worsened during the epidemic. The data obtained by the investigation does seem to be consistent with the anecdotal evidence I reported last time.
Only a few lucky people think that their memory has improved, but 80% of the people who participated in the experiment said that their memory has deteriorated in at least one aspect, which is much higher than we usually expect.
We must remember that some of the interviewees have already responded on social media to fill out a questionnaire to answer the question of whether there was a problem with their memory during the epidemic. In other words, this type of interviewee is a self-selected sample, and it may be for this reason that they participated in Lovedi’s questionnaire. But not all participants are recruited in this way, and no matter how they participate, the results are similar.
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Studies have found that the new coronavirus pandemic has completely changed our perception of time.
The most common memory change is forgetting something or when a certain event happened. 55% of the interviewees said that such things have happened to them. This shows that the new coronavirus pandemic has affected our time concept, which is not surprising. Looking up the literature on time perception in my book “Time Warp”, it is obvious that some of our memories will be stamped with so-called time stamps. If a memory is unique and vivid, and personally participates, it will become a story we repeat and tell, we can accurately locate the moment that memory happened in our life timeline.
But most events in our lives are not like this, so it is difficult for us to accurately locate these events on the timeline. This problem is especially true in many aspects of the new coronavirus pandemic. Of course, you may remember the first time you heard about the need for home isolation, or (if you are lucky) when you were vaccinated. But in this more than a year, there hasn’t been much vivid, special, or other interesting things happening.
Over the past year or so, our scope of activities is very limited. It is nothing more than online meetings, walks, watching TV, and eating a meal at home. The monotonous repetition day after day, days, weeks, months, the days seem to be the same day. Last Wednesday felt like the previous Monday, and it’s even hard to know in which month you went for a walk in a certain park, let alone remember the exact day of the walk.
I was very interested to find that the interviewees said that the next most common category of poor memory is that they can’t say the correct word when they’re talking to their lips. This is called “tip of tongue phenomenon” in psychology. We all experience this sudden nerve short circuit from time to time, and the tip of the tongue phenomenon is more common when recalling people’s names. Usually, the other person’s name will come to mind after a while, “Oh, yes, his name is Tom!” But it was too late.
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People forget to do something, perhaps because of the lack of environmental cues around us to help remember.
It is not clear why the phenomenon of memory failure, which is impossible to speak, will increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is only possible to explain this: In the past year or so, many of us worked alone at home, or worked in the company but had to maintain social distance with colleagues, so there were few opportunities to talk to others. All in all, we lack social interaction.
Lofty’s new data also reveals other common memory degradation, such as forgetting what others told you, or forgetting to do what you said to do. The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is the lack of memory clues provided by the external environment. We used to go out to work, we could walk around the office, or go to other places for meetings, and we often met people. But now some people are confined to work in a room at home, staring at the same screen every day, and have endless meetings online. When people go out more often, they will pass by the meeting room or see someone walking past their desk. This kind of external clue will remind us that yes, we need to make a report for the next meeting or be friends tomorrow birthday.
It is worth noting that the most unique memories, that is, memories that are stamped with time stamps or memories that we tend to keep in mind, mostly involve events that happened outside. This may be in line with the hypothetical theory that when we leave home, the hippocampus in the brain becomes more active, and its function may be to ensure that we can always find a way home. On the contrary, if our lives are confined to home, the activity of the hippocampus in the brain responsible for this autobiographical memory may decrease.
Therefore, in this new study on how home isolation affects memory, one of the biggest predictors of how well people’s memory is is how much they move around in a day. Those who can go out and walk around and enter different buildings, or those who can walk between several rooms, are less likely to report that they have memory difficulties.
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Due to the lack of fresh experience, life is monotonous and repetitive, and the memories of days, weeks, and months are like the same day.
Another important factor, even more surprising at first glance, is the difference in gender. Women said that the possibility of memory deterioration is higher than that of men. What is going on here? Women are more likely to have memory decline during the epidemic, which seems to be because they have experienced more negative changes in their work environment and interpersonal relationships, and their overall pressure is also higher. This result is consistent with other studies that show that women are more severely hit by home isolation than men.
Lofti also asked the interviewees to describe an unforgettable memory during the quarantine period. Respondents mostly chose the period of April 2020, which is the early period of the first lockdown in the UK, rather than the period of isolation afterwards. Some interviewees prefer to be in the natural beauty moments, or the beginning or end of important moments in life, such as starting a new job, birth of a child, leaving a job, and a funeral.
Interviewees may also describe some common things about getting along with friends or family, but it will be an unusual way. For example, an interviewee talked about playing table tennis with his mother, but her mother was wearing gloves and a mask. The good news is that these so-called episodic memories are very detailed. Lofty concluded, “I think this shows that our memory system is not’broken’, it’s just not running at full speed all the time.”
This shows that when everything returns to normal and life is busy again, as long as we have no cognitive impairment, old memory clues will emerge one by one, and our effective memory should be restored as before. Like other aspects of this strange and sad year, the problem of poor memory will soon disappear from our minds.