Corona Daily 262: How Lockdown Affects Our Memory: Part I

In the last few months, some of my friends have wondered if their memory is getting worse. Talking about myself, I can’t confidently say the date unless I check it. In the B.C. (before coronavirus) era, I was good at knowing today’s date precisely. On the other hand, I still know the day of the week exactly. (Later this week, I will explain why.) Many people struggle when asked: What’s the day today? This week, I will try to list the different ways in which our memory can get affected in the lockdown and why. 

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Places play a big role in our memory. If you visit your school after many years, and take a walk inside, memories will come flooding in. Just as if those files were lying dormant in your brain, reactivated by the visit.

I had a strange experience in my twenties. I was living and working in Moscow. Only landlines existed then, with six-digit phone numbers in Bombay, and seven-digit numbers in Moscow. I was proud of my memory, and never wrote down a single number. Though not a switchboard receptionist, I easily remembered more than a hundred numbers each in Bombay and Moscow. International calls were very expensive. One year when calling became cheap following the Rouble’s collapse, I decided to call my Indian friends from Moscow. But as I started to dial with the receiver in hand, I was fumbling. Other than my parents’, I had difficulty recalling most numbers. However, when I returned to Bombay, I could recall all Bombay numbers with precision. Now the Moscow numbers had become foggy.

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In the last nine months, I have slept every night in the same house, in the same bed. It must be a personal record of some kind. Cognitive psychologists talk about the lack of cues to aid our memory. If you work in an office, there is the journey from the house. Whether you drive or use public transport, there is a change of scenery. The lift, garage, car, metro, trees on the street, building security gate, coffee machine in the office, all of them are daily milestones. I am not even talking of the people, the enormous number of strangers you come across in public transport, or while walking on the street. You may think of the commute to office and back as hell, but what it does is to train your memory all the time. With each place, some memory files are getting added to your brain. Your brain absorbs the background colours, the giant hoardings, the expressions of fellow travellers. Even when you know the names of all stations on your underground line, every time you travel, the names get reinforced in your memory.

Now, people working from home are in one place. The desk, the chair, and the computer screen. Little wonder the location-related memory power is inactive. The brain is not expanding.  

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Our brains have a seahorse-shaped component called the Hippocampus. (In fact, that’s the Greek word for seahorse). Thanks to the Hippocampus, we are able to find our way back home when we go out. This spatial ability, the skill to navigate is a critical memory function.

Some veteran London Black Taxi drivers boast of knowing every small lane in London. To verify this, one study actually invited them and scanned their brains. Without fail, all those drivers had much larger hippocampi compared to the average Londoner. People who for convenience use GPS or similar SatNav don’t allow their hippocampi to expand.

In one research neuroscientists found that if people’s lives become more confined and repetitive as they age, their use of the hippocampus decreases. The study didn’t see the current pandemic coming, but its conclusion is applicable to all of us, irrespective of age. In the lockdown, our use of the hippocampus is decreasing.

More on the subject tomorrow.

Ravi