What the pandemic is doing to our brains

The stress of the Covid-19 pandemic may be affecting how your brain works – even if you have never had the virus.

While “memory loss, fatigue and trouble concentrating” can affect those who have contracted Covid-19, scientists think that even people who have escaped infection could also be suffering from similar symptoms, said the BBC.

Pandemic brain fog

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Experts have labelled the phenomenon “pandemic brain” – where people suffer from “increased tiredness, impaired decision-making and a lack of focus” because of the “uncertainty and disruption to routines” that dealing with the pandemic has brought.

Emma Yhnell, a senior neuroscience lecturer at Cardiff University, is calling for more research into the effects of the pandemic on the brain.

“People form habits so we see friends on a particular day or enjoy a sport on a particular evening – and that lack of regularity can be quite challenging,” Dr Yhnell told the BBC.

“We know people who have experienced chronic stress or chronic anxiety see some changes to their brain in the parts that are involved in decision making and attention,” she continued. “But we need much more research to determine whether the experience of the pandemic has caused structural changes in people’s brains.”

Effect of chronic stress

In the winter of 2020-21, a study found that more than 40% of Americans reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, “double the rate of the previous year”, said MIT Technology Review. People also reported experiencing “brain fog”, including symptoms such as forgetfulness and difficulty concentrating.

Our experiences during the pandemic may have affected the neuroplasticity of our brains, said the magazine, a process which is “vital for learning, memory, and general healthy brain function”.

“Every experience changes your brain, either helping you to gain new synapses – the connections between brain cells – or causing you to lose them,” explained the magazine.

Stress, which many of us will have experienced throughout the pandemic, can “not only destroy existing synapses but also inhibit the growth of new ones”.

If our stress reaches chronic levels, the brain can be flooded with chemicals called glucocorticoids, such as cortisol. In the long term, this chemical can cause changes in our brain that “lead to depression, anxiety, forgetfulness, and inattention”.

The social isolation brought on by the pandemic is also likely to have affected our brains, too. “Loneliness has been linked to reduced volume in the hippocampus and amygdala, as well as decreased connectivity in the prefrontal cortex,” said MIT Technology Review. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who lived alone during the pandemic experienced higher rates of depression and anxiety.”

Although there are few peer-reviewed studies on the effects of the pandemic on cognitive function, neuroscientists are able to extrapolate from previous work on trauma, boredom, stress and inactivity on the brains of mammals, said The Atlantic last year.

A natural adaptation

“We’re all walking around with some mild cognitive impairment,” said Mike Yassa, a neuroscientist at the University of California Irvine, told the magazine. “Based on everything we know about the brain, two of the things that are really good for it are physical activity and novelty. A thing that’s very bad for it is chronic and perpetual stress.”

In some ways, the “brain fog” and forgetfulness some people are reporting could be “a natural adaptation” and “evidence of the resilience of our species”.

“Our brains are very good at learning different things and forgetting the things that are not a priority,” Tina Franklin, a neuroscientist at Georgia Institute of Technology, told The Atlantic.

The pandemic has brought about considerable changes to our routine and habits, placing old ones like “taking the bus and going to restaurants in deep storage” in our brains. But when our lives revert back to something like we had before the pandemic, “presumably so will our recall”, said the magazine.