Pandemic living can make it much more difficult to form a memory at all, let alone call it back when we need it, said Yassa, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine.

 

“Sometimes we’re a little bit harder on ourselves. We think, ‘Oh, how did I forget this? This is something that should be so natural for me to store,'” he said. “But it turns out that something happened during encoding that made it actually impossible for you to even get this memory onboard to begin with.

“So, if we’re sleep deprived, if we’re stressed, if we’ve got a million things on our minds, we’re much more likely to be inattentive in that manner and then attribute it later to some sort of forgetting.”

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Even without the brain fog that comes with catching the virus, the sameness of the days, lack of social interaction and decreased exercise can make it much more difficult to make memories, Javadi said.

 

While in lockdown or not participating in your pre-pandemic activities, each day may look similar. This sameness takes away the anchors that help us organize our memories. — Madeline Holcombe, CNN