According to a recent study, the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic has caused people to lose track of time. Scottish researchers have found that people made errors when trying to recall events from 2021, findings that are consistent with memory gaps experienced by people who have served time in prison.
Isolation from the pandemic felt like being in prison for the brain
“Remembering when past events happened becomes more difficult as more time passes. In addition, people’s activities and emotions can influence their perception of the passage of time,” said study co-author Arash Sahraie.
Previous studies have linked COVID-19 infection to brain shrinkage, memory loss and “face blindness,” but Sahraie’s team was interested in how the pandemic shutdown affected “people’s perception of time,” reports nypost.com.
“The social isolation resulting from the COVID-19 lockdown has had a significant impact on people’s activities and emotions, and previous research has shown that the pandemic triggered distortions in people’s perception of time,” added the University of Aberdeen professor.
The study analyzed responses to a survey conducted in 2022, in which 277 participants were asked to associate the events with the years they occurred, ranging from 2016 to 2022.
People were polled about when major news events happened — like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s bombshell interview on Oprah or the death of George Floyd. They also completed a questionnaire about their mental health.
While distant memories picked up more errors, the researchers found that people’s abilities to recall events from 2021 were poor. Some respondents even matched the events three or four years before.
The conclusion was that many of the study participants had difficulty recalling the timing of events that coincided with the COVID-19 closures. In fact, the results “are similar to those previously reported for prison inmates.”
