That covers “everything from our memory, our attention and our ability to problem-solve to our capacity to be creative. What we call brain fog, Catherine Loveday, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Westminster, calls poor “cognitive function”. It’s a completely normal reaction to this quite traumatic experience we’ve collectively had over the last 12 months or so.” I ask Jon Simons, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, could it really be something “sciencey”? “Yes, it’s definitely something sciencey – and it’s helpful to understand that this feeling isn’t unusual or weird,” he says. But researchers believe it is far more interesting than it feels: even that this common experience can be explained by cutting-edge neuroscience theories, and that studying it could further scientific understanding of the brain and how it changes. This dulled, useless state of mind – epitomised by the act of going into a room and then forgetting why we are there – is so boring, so lifeless. Although restrictions are now easing across the UK, with greater freedom to circulate and socialise, he says lockdown for many of us has been “a contraction of life, and an almost parallel contraction of mental capacity”. “There’s this sense of debilitation, of losing ordinary facility with everyday life a forgetfulness and a kind of deskilling,” says Cohen, author of the self-help book How to Live. They talk with urgency of feeling unable to concentrate in meetings, to read, to follow intricately plotted television programmes. Now they appear on his computer screen and tell him about brain fog. Before the pandemic, psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s patients might come into his consulting room, lie down on the couch and talk about the traffic or the weather, or the rude person on the tube.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |