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Glad your expectations of me are for rational fact-based responses to not very challenging, easily debunkable, posts from you.
It was more expensive worldwide, and now our inflation is lower than in most industrialized countries. Enjoy the announcement of the Fed's interest rate cut coming later today; a vote of confidence in the subdued inflation that they labored to create with relentless interest rate hikes.
Supply chain generated shortages, and price inflation, that you wouldn't blame Trump for then became something to blame Biden for?
The Biden/Harris Chips and Science Bill will help assure no more chip shortages like we endured during the Trump pandemic; and much of the supply will travel over new and repaired roads and bridges made possible by the Biden/Harris Infrastructure Bill. That's a BILL, not an endless succession of Trump's 'infrastructure weeks'.
His response...to downplay Covid, his words....contributed to the lost jobs as well as to more Covid deaths.
The statement comparing him to Hoover is accurate. He f'ckd up the biggest crisis of his presidency,
How Trump Has Downplayed The Coronavirus Pandemic
NPR
https://www.npr.org › sections › 2020/10/02 › how-tru...
Oct 2, 2020 — Here is a sampling of what the president has said and when, including that time he said a "miracle" might make the pandemic "disappear."
Trump told Bob Woodward he knew in February that ...
NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com › politics › donald-trump › t...
Sep 9, 2020 — President Donald Trump acknowledged the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic in a February interview with journalist Bob Woodward and acknowledged downplaying ...
Trump Tells Woodward He Deliberately Downplayed ...
NPR
https://www.npr.org › 2020/09/10 › trump-tells-woodw...
Sep 10, 2020 — A new book by Bob Woodward reveals that President Trump thought the threat posed by the coronavirus was much worse than what he revealed publicly.
NO president would not have had the Covid vaxxes fast tracked.
He said nothing to promote the Covid vaxxes for more than a year after he left office in disgrace. When he did finally, tepidly, speak out in favor of getting the Covid vaxxes he was roundly booed by his audience of supporters.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/20/politics/donald-trump-booster-shot-boos/index.html
The entire article I posted is also NOT nonsense.
Sorta not like that. Harris hasn't proposed the concepts of plans. So we're back to speculation about 'reading between the lines'....insert conspiracy theories.
You ahistorical Trumpers insist on pretending that Trump wasn't president during the first year of the pandemic. It's a lengthy article and it does not support the 'better off arguments' from the right. Particularly for those who died both pre and post Covid vaxx availability. Trump's junk science driven response carried over into the anti-Covid vax stance of Trumpers which killed them in greater numbers as compared to the vaxxed in both Parties. NOT better off indeed.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/trumps-economic-legacy/story?id=74760051
A look at Trump's economic legacy
Examining the outgoing president's policies from tax cuts to trade wars.
ByCatherine Thorbecke
January 20, 2021, 5:14 AM
Yet as he leaves after his one-term tenure, Trump has become the first president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression to depart office with fewer jobs in the country than when he entered.
Economists say Trump’s economic legacy will be defined by his failure in leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic that exacerbated the financial downturn, domestic policies that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, and international trade policies that hurt U.S. industry while simultaneously alienating allies.
By attempting to implement economic policy through the so-called "art of the deal" and ignoring lessons that many economists have learned over the last 50 years -- such as the importance of Fed independence, the effects of large budget deficits on trade deficits, the value of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and more -- he failed to achieve his own self-proclaimed goals of reducing the trade deficit with China, controlling the national debt or strengthening the American manufacturing sector.
Tax Cut and Jobs Act, deregulation and national debt
Even before the virus further exacerbated U.S. income inequality, some experts say Trump’s economic policies favored the wealthy -- and left the poor and middle class behind.
His Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017 provided major tax breaks to corporations and wealthy individuals. The policy, among other things, reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%.
Frankel called the policy "beyond ironic" for a president "who campaigned in 2016 on being the champion of the working man or working person and campaigned on 'draining the swamp' in Washington."
Shierholz said this policy "absolutely increased inequality" and the "vast majority of the benefits of those tax cuts went to the already very wealthy."
The economists also noted that the policy came at a time when unemployment was relatively low and the economy in good shape.
"That's not the time to be giving away trillions of dollars to the wealthy," Frankel said. "When you have a bad shock like the global financial crisis of 2008-09 or like the coronavirus crisis that we're still going through -- that's the time to increase government spending and expansionary fiscal policy, but you lose the ability to do that if you gave it away."
In response to the coronavirus crisis, Congress rallied quickly in March to put out a $2.2 trillion relief package that Trump signed into law. As the virus continued to rage throughout the summer, however, lawmakers and the White House dragged their feet on further aid for months before passing a second relief package at the end of 2020. Even after Congress green-lit the $900 billion package, Trump delayed signing for nearly a week, demanding larger direct checks to individuals, but also unrelated concessions.
Kamala Harris Jumps to Record 6-Point Lead Over Trump in New Poll
WIDENING GAP
Liam Archacki
Breaking News Intern
Published Sep. 17, 2024 5:45PM EDT
Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed a six-point lead over former President Donald Trump in a Morning Consult poll published Tuesday. The margin is a record for Harris so far in the presidential race. The widening gap between the two candidates, which now sits at 51 to 45, seems to reflect a shift in public opinion after Harris’ dominant debate performance a week ago.
Most polls before the debate had Trump and Harris essentially tied. Morning Consult’s analysis of its own poll noted the key demographics in which support for Harris is surging. “Her 51% of support among likely voters, which is also at a record high, is driven largely by her best figures to date among Democrats, Biden 2020 voters, liberals, women, 18- to 34-year-olds and millennials,” it said. The poll excluded respondents who said they were less than an eight out of 10 in terms of their likelihood to vote in November.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kamala-harris-jumps-to-record-6-point-lead-over-trump-in-new-morning-consult-poll?utm_source=web_push
Kamala Harris Jumps to Record 6-Point Lead Over Trump in New Poll
WIDENING GAP
Liam Archacki
Breaking News Intern
Published Sep. 17, 2024 5:45PM EDT
Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed a six-point lead over former President Donald Trump in a Morning Consult poll published Tuesday. The margin is a record for Harris so far in the presidential race. The widening gap between the two candidates, which now sits at 51 to 45, seems to reflect a shift in public opinion after Harris’ dominant debate performance a week ago.
Most polls before the debate had Trump and Harris essentially tied. Morning Consult’s analysis of its own poll noted the key demographics in which support for Harris is surging. “Her 51% of support among likely voters, which is also at a record high, is driven largely by her best figures to date among Democrats, Biden 2020 voters, liberals, women, 18- to 34-year-olds and millennials,” it said. The poll excluded respondents who said they were less than an eight out of 10 in terms of their likelihood to vote in November.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kamala-harris-jumps-to-record-6-point-lead-over-trump-in-new-morning-consult-poll?utm_source=web_push
That was a typo by me. 'Read between the lines' IS an inadequate replacement for the facts as laid out in the fact checks, of which there are many
You're asking for belief in the unseen which is unseen because it's not happening as YOU believe.
In other words you've got jack shit.
Your take on Harris, as usual, is at sharp variance with reality; the measurement of that reality in the polls.
Kamala Harris Jumps to Record 6-Point Lead Over Trump in New Poll
WIDENING GAP
Liam Archacki
Breaking News Intern
Published Sep. 17, 2024 5:45PM EDT
Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed a six-point lead over former President Donald Trump in a Morning Consult poll published Tuesday. The margin is a record for Harris so far in the presidential race. The widening gap between the two candidates, which now sits at 51 to 45, seems to reflect a shift in public opinion after Harris’ dominant debate performance a week ago.
Most polls before the debate had Trump and Harris essentially tied. Morning Consult’s analysis of its own poll noted the key demographics in which support for Harris is surging. “Her 51% of support among likely voters, which is also at a record high, is driven largely by her best figures to date among Democrats, Biden 2020 voters, liberals, women, 18- to 34-year-olds and millennials,” it said. The poll excluded respondents who said they were less than an eight out of 10 in terms of their likelihood to vote in November.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kamala-harris-jumps-to-record-6-point-lead-over-trump-in-new-morning-consult-poll?utm_source=web_push
Civil War Isn’t the Movie You Think It Is
By Bilge Ebiri, a film critic for New York and Vulture
Updated Sept. 13, 2024
Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny in Civil War. Photo: Murray Close /A24
This review was published on April 12, 2024. As of September 13, Civil War is available to stream on Max.
Americans sure do love to see their institutions destroyed onscreen. I remember back when it was sorta-kinda news that audiences applauded and cheered as aliens blew up the White House in Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996). Since then, it’s been standard operating practice for blockbusters, particularly the disaster-y ones, to incinerate or otherwise defile a monument or an iconic government building. (We took a brief recess after 9/11 — “too soon,” etc. — but went right back to it once the cultural all-clear sounded.)
Maybe because our institutions were deemed so secure and unchanging for so long, the idea that they might be ravaged by aliens, meteors, zombies, or Dylan McDermott became a naughty fantasy we were eager to see played out onscreen, over and over and over again. A variation on this kind of chaos has become all too real over the past few years, with more than 40 percent of the country in a 2022 poll saying they think a civil war is likely within the next decade. I’m not entirely convinced that the constant barrage of apocalyptic destruction on our screens is unrelated. We’ve been spectators to the fantasy for so long that we’ve come to imagine we’re participants in it.
Here’s another truth about repeatedly indulging in our fantasies: We become desensitized to them. What makes Alex Garland’s Civil War so diabolically clever is the way that it both revels in and abhors our fascination with the idea of America as a battlefield. No real monuments get done blowed up real good in this one. The spectacle this time is coyer but somehow all-consuming. What’s being incinerated in Civil War is the American idea itself.
The film is set in what appears to be the present, but in this version of the present a combination of strongman tactics and secessionist movements have fractured the United States into multiple armed, politically unspecified factions. The president (Nick Offerman) has refused to give up power and is now serving his third term; he’s dissolved the FBI, bombed American cities, and made a point of killing journalists on sight, or so we’re told. California and Texas have joined forces and become something called the Western Front. There’s also the so-called Florida Alliance. Smoke rises from the cities; the highways are filled with walls of wrecked cars; suicide bombers dive into crowds lined up for water rations; death squads, snipers, and mass graves dot the countryside.
How we got here, or what these people are fighting over, is mostly meaningless to Kirsten Dunst’s Lee and Wagner Moura’s Joel, two war journalists making the treacherous drive from New York City to Washington, D.C., for an exclusive, probably dangerous interview with the beleaguered president. Tagging along for the ride in their van are Jessie, played by Cailee Spaeny, a young, inexperienced photographer who aspires to a career like Lee’s, and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an aging reporter who wants to go to the front lines in Charlottesville. Lee is vexed by both their presences. Jessie’s too young, and Sammy’s too old. The blood-soaked highways of the divided states of America are no place for either of them.
The journalists covering this war gather in hotel bars, get drunk, and loudly yuk it up with the jacked-up bonhomie we might recognize from movies set in foreign lands like The Killing Fields, Under Fire, and Salvador. They’re mostly numb to the horrors they’re chronicling. After the young Jessie is scarred by an early run-in with a man who threatens to shoot two unarmed, tortured, barely alive captives, Lee tells her that it’s not their job to ask questions or get involved: “We take pictures so others can ask these questions.”
One of the reasons Lee is such a legend in her field is because she has grown a protective shell around herself. She wants to get the picture. That’s it. She’s protective of Jessie but only to the extent that the girl will slow them down or upend their plans. “Would you photograph that moment, if I got shot?” Jessie asks. “What do you think?” Lee responds, as if the answer is obviously yes. But we also understand that Lee bears the psychological scars of what she’s seen. At night, alone in her bath at a hotel, she covers her eyes and revisits the horrors she’s photographed all over the world. “I thought I was sending a message home: Don’t do this,” she says of her earlier work. “But here we are.” Garland can be clunky and obvious with his dialogue, but Dunst can also make just about any line sound true. Her face tells one story, her words tell another; together, they bring this conflicted woman to life.
The film embodies Lee’s traumatized numbness to a degree. Garland knows how to build suspense, and he depicts astonishing violence with the requisite horror, but he also moves his film along in playfully provocative ways. After one ghastly sequence in which guerrillas shoot a weeping soldier, the director cuts to a montage set to De La Soul’s “Say No Go,” a song about a horrific subject that adds a peppy beat to the grisly images onscreen. (I was reminded of the way Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket cut to the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” right after a similar firefight.)
Even the film’s episodic quality — it’s really just a ghastly travelogue through the war-torn Eastern Seaboard, with our protagonists confronted at each stop with some upsetting new incident — feels like a provocation. Part of shutting yourself off to such horrors involves being able to move past them, and Civil War, like its characters, glides past each monstrous vignette with unbothered brio. This can make the film feel weirdly weightless at times. Its characters are observers and nomads. If anything, they feel less invested in what they’re witnessing as the movie goes on.
Civil War’s lack of a political point of view, as well as its refusal to really identify the positions of its warring parties, has come in for some understandable criticism. But does any sane person really want a version of this film that attempts to spell out these people’s politics or, even worse, takes sides in its fictional conflict? (That sounds like it would be the worst movie ever made.) Garland does include flashes of real news footage from a variety of recent American disturbances, but he’s clearly done more research into media depictions of other countries’ war zones.
This is maybe his best idea, and why the film’s lack of political context feels more pointed than spineless: The conceit here is to depict Americans acting the way we’ve seen people act in other international conflicts, be it Vietnam or Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia or Iraq or Gaza or … well, the list goes on. In that sense, Civil War winds up becoming a movie about itself. Beyond the plausibility of war in the United States or the tragedy of such an eventuality, it’s about the way we refuse to let images from wars like this get to us. It’s more a call for reflection, an attempt to put us in the shoes of others, than a warning — not an It Can Happen Here movie, but a Here’s What It’s Like movie. It doesn’t want to make us feel so much as it wants us to ask why we don’t feel anything.
https://www.vulture.com/article/review-civil-war-starring-kirsten-dunst-and-cailee-spaeny.html
You need to read this and you need to remember Trump's reference to fine people on both sides when one side carried torches and chanted 'the Jews will not replace us'; sounds Hitlerian to me.
JD Vance once called former U.S. President Donald Trump "America's Hitler."
Rating: Correct Attribution
Context
In 2016, Vance wrote in a private message to his former law school roommate: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?"
Shortly after Donald Trump announced his running mate in the 2024 presidential election — U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio — a claim spread on social media that Vance once called Trump "America's Hitler."
"How do you feel about JD Vance being VP for who he believes to be 'America's Hitler'?" one Reddit post asked.
The claim was true. In a 2016 text message to his former law school roommate, Vance wrote: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?"
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vance-trump-hitler-quote/
You are the one making the mistake. Trump has threatened and brow beat people for years. That people hate him enough to shoot him IS on him. If it happens you will read all of his violence provoking statements that will be dragged out to prove my point.
The labels are far less important than his words and actions. Hatred spilling out from him coming right back to him.
I saw it and I agree, though the notion of an alliance between TX and CA strains credulity.
Well said. And why should vaccinations and public health measures become a political issue? The combo of selfishness with junk science fueled, anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theories and faux patriotism was also lethal to too many of those who manifested all three.
And I meant that your 'it's ok....' is immaterial to the facts of the matter for which 'read between the lies' is a totally inadequate rebuttal.
What didn't YOU understand about the relevant examples I provided?
You ARE dense. I was mocking your un-apostrophized 'thats'. I just received a squiggly spell check red line that a right click reveals that it should be......that's.
It doesn't have to be ok with you. Post evidence that the requirements for the use of the Iranian money are not airtightly for humanitarian purposes.
If Amazon limited your purchases to only the food it believed were healthy for you do you not believe that they would be capable of blocking purchases not meeting that requirement?
It's also analogous to not being able to purchase liquor using a SNAP card
It's not rocket science
That IS enough.
Your posts, with way too much misinformation and unfounded, unsupportable assertions, EARN the responses that they receive. You shouldn't be surprised that some of us lose our patience with those kinds of posts.
The primary problem is that there are differing levels of formal education on these boards. It's not elite to understand and call out logical fallacies and to do the fact checking that apparently is too much heavy lifting for the likes of you.
Your response to a fact check on the Iranian money assertions was 'read between the lines'. Sorry, but the fact check was both conclusive and, just as importantly, corroborated by other fact checks. Google it, for the first time.
Follow the thread, I gave links for Vance's and Trump's mendacity and expression of hatred. My opinions are informed by facts that I can back up and your assertions about 'spin' are failed attempts at gaslighting pure and oh so simple.
AI Overview
Learn more
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The term "gaslighting" comes from the 1938 play Gas Light, which was adapted into a 1944 film of the same name. In the play and film, a man manipulates his wife into believing she's losing her mind by dimming the gas lights in their home and then denying that anything changed when she points it out. The term became popular due to the film's plot and popularity.
Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that can cause victims to question their own feelings, instincts, and sanity. The term has evolved to encompass a broader understanding of psychological manipulation and control in various contexts, such as healthcare, the workplace, and politics.
Spin ONLY to people who do not understand the plain meaning of words.
And it's not spin that Trump and Vance undermine any claims by you that the 'other side' is the greater prompter of falsehoods and hatred.
No problem. The troll count on the other boards declines from time to time and like a shark I need my chum. 😏
Absolutely certain. That you are a promoter of bothsidesism and false equivalency makes your posts easy targets for, again, those things that I don't mistake for hatred.
'Pretty sure' doesn't cut it without concrete example. I gave you two examples; mendacity from Vance and an explicit statement of hatred from Trump.
I'm not a liar nor a fabulist like Vance nor do I mistake deserved contempt, sarcasm and ridicule for hatred.
Not remotely close. Unlike Vance I don't believe that it's responsible to make up and spread baseless rumors that endanger the safety of others. Imagine the amount of shit you would lose if a dem at any level had said..."If I have to create stories.....
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/09/15/jd-vance-create-stories-migrants-eating-pets/75236975007/
JD Vance says he does not regret spreading baseless rumors of migrants eating pets
"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that's what I'm going to do," Vance told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.
Officials in the small town of Springfield, Ohio have called these accounts untrue and a woman behind a Facebook post that sparked the rumor has since said she did not have firsthand knowledge.
It's not an aberration either.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/g-s1-23115/trump-taylor-swift-kamala-harris-endorsement
Trump says 'I hate Taylor Swift' after pop star endorses Harris
September 15, 20243:37 PM ET
I would have been booted long ago if the answer to your 'ask' was what you wanted it to be.
The board intro is 'hidden'. Read it and then ask yourself if your posts live up to the standards you will be asked to uphold.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/Just-Politics-11305#about
You have too low a bar for your hate accusations. Sarcasm and deserved ridicule do not clear even that bar.
Identify 'this' for us please. You read the fact check and it soundly rebutted/refuted your 'read between the lines' crap.
That's because your posts scream out for fact checking, and it's easy.
'Read between the lines' calls for supposition and is not considered evidence. It's right up there with 'people are saying' and the rest of the conclusion jumping nonsense that people like you fall for.
Did the Pandemic Break Our Brains?
Did the pandemic break 🚑️ more Trumpanzee, antivaxxer, 🧠s than any other group? I'd say that the evidence is manifest in the shabby, ill-thought out, logical fallacy ridden posts of our trolls.
Brain memory loss concept
Flavio Coelho—Getty Images
By Jamie Ducharme
September 16, 2024 1:59 PM EDT
https://time.com/7021575/covid-pandemic-19-brain-cognition/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc&utm_campaign=newsletter+brief+default+ac&utm_content=+++20240917+++body&et_rid=207276253&lctg=207276253
Not long ago, Mark Chiverton, a 33-year-old in the U.K., noticed he was making a lot of silly mistakes. He’d mix up words when writing emails, or blank on a basic term while talking to his wife. None of these slip-ups were all that concerning on their own—but they were happening frequently enough that Chiverton worried he was, to put it bluntly, “getting dumber.”
“At first I thought, ‘Maybe it’s just general aging, or maybe I bashed my head and didn’t realize it,’” he says. But eventually, a thought occurred to him: could COVID-19 be the reason for his mental slips? Chiverton thinks he caught the virus in early 2020, before tests were widely available, and he knows for sure he had it in 2022. Though he has no lingering physical effects from those infections (and has periods of time when his brain cramps get better), he sometimes wonders whether those mental slips are mild signs of Long COVID, the name for chronic symptoms following an infection.
He’s not alone in experiencing these problems—and he may not be wrong that COVID-19 is to blame. In the U.S. alone, about a million more working-age adults reported having serious difficulty remembering, concentrating, or making decisions in 2023 compared to before the pandemic, according to a New York Times analysis of Census Bureau data.
Every mental mistake isn't cause for concern, says Andrew Petkus, an associate professor of clinical neurology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. Blunders like forgetting why you walked into a room or spacing out on an appointment can be totally normal parts of being busy, distracted, often under-rested humans. Even though you likely did those things before and brushed them off as nothing, they may seem more significant in the wake of a life-altering event like the pandemic. "If we didn’t have COVID, you might have still forgotten," Petkus says.
Still, it’s not outlandish to think the pandemic has had an effect on our minds, says Jonas Vibell, a cognitive and behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Vibell is currently trying to measure post-COVID inflammation and neuronal damage in the brains of people who report symptoms like brain fog, sluggishness, or reduced energy. When he began publicizing the study, he says, “I got so many emails from lots of people saying the same thing”: that they’d never fully bounced back after the pandemic.
But why? It’s probably a mix of things, Vibell says. The SARS-CoV-2 virus can affect the brain directly, as many studies have now shown. But the pandemic may have also affected cognition in less-obvious ways. Months or years spent at home, living most of life through screens, may have left a lingering mark. Even though society is now mostly back to normal, the trauma of living through a terrifying, unprecedented health crisis can be hard to shake.
Your brain on SARS-CoV-2
It’s clear by now that SARS-CoV-2 is not just a respiratory virus, but also one that can affect organs throughout the body—including the brain. Researchers are still learning about why that is, but leading hypotheses suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may cause persistent inflammation in the brain, damage to blood vessels in the brain, immune dysfunction so extreme it affects the brain, or perhaps a combination of all the above. Studies have even found that people’s brains can shrink after having COVID-19, a change potentially associated with cognitive issues.
COVID-19 has been linked to serious cognitive problems, including dementia and suicidal thinking. And brain fog, a common symptom of Long COVID, can be so profound that people are unable to live the lives and work the jobs they once did. But COVID-19 also seems able to affect the brain in subtler ways. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared the cognitive performance of people who'd fully recovered from COVID-19 with that of a similar group of people who'd never had the virus. The COVID-19 group did worse, equivalent to a deficit of about three IQ points.
That’s not a dramatic difference. Our cognitive abilities naturally fluctuate a little from day to day—and in a July interview with TIME, study co-author Adam Hampshire, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at King’s College London, said a three-point IQ difference is “well within” the range of that normal fluctuation, so small that some people might not even notice it.
But could such a drop be enough to lead to, say, extra typos and absentmindedness? Maybe. In Hampshire’s study, people who’d had COVID-19 consistently performed worse on cognitive tests than people who hadn’t.
If the brain suffers “mild but ubiquitous” changes after an infection, Vibell says, those effects could feasibly “impact the brain, behavior, and social behavior in so many subtle, but maybe [cumulatively] quite bad, ways.”
Beyond the virus
Even for the lucky few who have never been infected, living through a pandemic can impact the brain.
For a recent study in PNAS, researchers conducted pairs of MRI brain scans on a small group of U.S. adolescents: one in 2018 and one in either 2021 or 2022. Over those years, they observed a notable thinning in parts of the kids’ (and especially girls’) brains, including those that control social cognition tasks like processing facial expressions and emotions. Although the researchers did not analyze the effects of SARS-CoV-2 infections, they concluded that the stress of living through pandemic lockdowns was likely to blame for the change, which they likened to an extra four years of brain aging for girls and an extra year for boys.
Stress and trauma have well-documented effects on the brain. Plenty of studies show that people who experience trauma tend to be at greater risk for cognitive decline as they age. Stress can also impair someone’s ability to think clearly, reason, and remember, studies suggest.
“COVID was a generational traumatic event,” says USC’s Petkus. “Everybody was exposed to it.” It’s feasible, then, that the population at large is suffering some of these side effects from trauma and stress.
Even beyond the mental toll of living through a scary and unsettling time, many people had to abandon habits that are good for the brain—things like socializing, staying physically and cognitively active, and seeking out novel experiences—when they were stuck at home early on, Petkus says. It’s too soon to say whether that dramatic but short-lived period will have long-lasting effects—but four years after the virus emerged, some things are still not as they were.
For example, student test scores are recovering but have still not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels; declines have been particularly dramatic in low-income school districts as well as those that had remote learning in place for a long time, says Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and one of the leaders of the Education Recovery Scorecard, a research project focused on pandemic learning loss. The long recovery process probably speaks to a combination of things, Reardon says: not only did kids miss in-person school for a while, they also experienced seismic disruptions in their lives, endured a period of significant stress and anxiety, and are now being asked to learn new material in school while also making up for pandemic-related learning gaps.
“Falling behind on your math skills or your reading skills is not really about a change in your intelligence,” Reardon says. “It’s a change in your skills, how much you’ve had the opportunity to learn.”
It’s hard to say whether the same trends appear among adults, because grownups aren’t taking standardized tests every year at work. Adults were certainly exposed to the same mix of stress, trauma, boredom, and isolation as kids—but Reardon says his hunch is that adults may have an easier time rebounding, since they’ve already developed the skills they lean on to perform complex tasks.
Returning to normal
“There might have been a shock for a couple years, but things are getting back to normal,” Petkus agrees.
Those who feel like their minds melted a little during the pandemic can likely benefit from adopting or resuming the kinds of brain-boosting habits that fell by the wayside during Netflix-fueled lockdowns, like social interaction and mental and physical exercise, Petkus says. Even the effects of stress and trauma can often be counterbalanced with social support and healthy coping strategies, he says. People who recover well from hard events sometimes even experience what’s known as post-traumatic growth, a blossoming of their mental and emotional health after a difficult period.
It’s harder to say whether brain changes that result directly from SARS-CoV-2 infections are reversible, as researchers are still studying that question. But there are some positive signs. Some of the potential causes of chronic brain fog—like persistent inflammation or damage to blood vessels—are theoretically reversible with the right treatments.
Even in Hampshire’s study on post-COVID IQ differences, there was cause for optimism. Hampshire’s team found that people with Long COVID symptoms were, on average, about six IQ points beneath people who’d never had COVID-19. But those whose Long COVID symptoms resolved over time also saw their cognitive scores improve.
That finding is “quite positive,” he said. “There could be some hope for people who are struggling.”
Did the Pandemic Break Our Brains?
Did the pandemic break 🚑️ more Trumpanzee, antivaxxer, 🧠s than any other group? I'd say that the evidence is manifest in the shabby, ill-thought out, logical fallacy ridden posts of our trolls.
Brain memory loss concept
Flavio Coelho—Getty Images
By Jamie Ducharme
September 16, 2024 1:59 PM EDT
https://time.com/7021575/covid-pandemic-19-brain-cognition/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc&utm_campaign=newsletter+brief+default+ac&utm_content=+++20240917+++body&et_rid=207276253&lctg=207276253
Not long ago, Mark Chiverton, a 33-year-old in the U.K., noticed he was making a lot of silly mistakes. He’d mix up words when writing emails, or blank on a basic term while talking to his wife. None of these slip-ups were all that concerning on their own—but they were happening frequently enough that Chiverton worried he was, to put it bluntly, “getting dumber.”
“At first I thought, ‘Maybe it’s just general aging, or maybe I bashed my head and didn’t realize it,’” he says. But eventually, a thought occurred to him: could COVID-19 be the reason for his mental slips? Chiverton thinks he caught the virus in early 2020, before tests were widely available, and he knows for sure he had it in 2022. Though he has no lingering physical effects from those infections (and has periods of time when his brain cramps get better), he sometimes wonders whether those mental slips are mild signs of Long COVID, the name for chronic symptoms following an infection.
He’s not alone in experiencing these problems—and he may not be wrong that COVID-19 is to blame. In the U.S. alone, about a million more working-age adults reported having serious difficulty remembering, concentrating, or making decisions in 2023 compared to before the pandemic, according to a New York Times analysis of Census Bureau data.
Every mental mistake isn't cause for concern, says Andrew Petkus, an associate professor of clinical neurology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. Blunders like forgetting why you walked into a room or spacing out on an appointment can be totally normal parts of being busy, distracted, often under-rested humans. Even though you likely did those things before and brushed them off as nothing, they may seem more significant in the wake of a life-altering event like the pandemic. "If we didn’t have COVID, you might have still forgotten," Petkus says.
Still, it’s not outlandish to think the pandemic has had an effect on our minds, says Jonas Vibell, a cognitive and behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Vibell is currently trying to measure post-COVID inflammation and neuronal damage in the brains of people who report symptoms like brain fog, sluggishness, or reduced energy. When he began publicizing the study, he says, “I got so many emails from lots of people saying the same thing”: that they’d never fully bounced back after the pandemic.
But why? It’s probably a mix of things, Vibell says. The SARS-CoV-2 virus can affect the brain directly, as many studies have now shown. But the pandemic may have also affected cognition in less-obvious ways. Months or years spent at home, living most of life through screens, may have left a lingering mark. Even though society is now mostly back to normal, the trauma of living through a terrifying, unprecedented health crisis can be hard to shake.
Your brain on SARS-CoV-2
It’s clear by now that SARS-CoV-2 is not just a respiratory virus, but also one that can affect organs throughout the body—including the brain. Researchers are still learning about why that is, but leading hypotheses suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may cause persistent inflammation in the brain, damage to blood vessels in the brain, immune dysfunction so extreme it affects the brain, or perhaps a combination of all the above. Studies have even found that people’s brains can shrink after having COVID-19, a change potentially associated with cognitive issues.
COVID-19 has been linked to serious cognitive problems, including dementia and suicidal thinking. And brain fog, a common symptom of Long COVID, can be so profound that people are unable to live the lives and work the jobs they once did. But COVID-19 also seems able to affect the brain in subtler ways. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared the cognitive performance of people who'd fully recovered from COVID-19 with that of a similar group of people who'd never had the virus. The COVID-19 group did worse, equivalent to a deficit of about three IQ points.
That’s not a dramatic difference. Our cognitive abilities naturally fluctuate a little from day to day—and in a July interview with TIME, study co-author Adam Hampshire, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at King’s College London, said a three-point IQ difference is “well within” the range of that normal fluctuation, so small that some people might not even notice it.
But could such a drop be enough to lead to, say, extra typos and absentmindedness? Maybe. In Hampshire’s study, people who’d had COVID-19 consistently performed worse on cognitive tests than people who hadn’t.
If the brain suffers “mild but ubiquitous” changes after an infection, Vibell says, those effects could feasibly “impact the brain, behavior, and social behavior in so many subtle, but maybe [cumulatively] quite bad, ways.”
Beyond the virus
Even for the lucky few who have never been infected, living through a pandemic can impact the brain.
For a recent study in PNAS, researchers conducted pairs of MRI brain scans on a small group of U.S. adolescents: one in 2018 and one in either 2021 or 2022. Over those years, they observed a notable thinning in parts of the kids’ (and especially girls’) brains, including those that control social cognition tasks like processing facial expressions and emotions. Although the researchers did not analyze the effects of SARS-CoV-2 infections, they concluded that the stress of living through pandemic lockdowns was likely to blame for the change, which they likened to an extra four years of brain aging for girls and an extra year for boys.
Stress and trauma have well-documented effects on the brain. Plenty of studies show that people who experience trauma tend to be at greater risk for cognitive decline as they age. Stress can also impair someone’s ability to think clearly, reason, and remember, studies suggest.
“COVID was a generational traumatic event,” says USC’s Petkus. “Everybody was exposed to it.” It’s feasible, then, that the population at large is suffering some of these side effects from trauma and stress.
Even beyond the mental toll of living through a scary and unsettling time, many people had to abandon habits that are good for the brain—things like socializing, staying physically and cognitively active, and seeking out novel experiences—when they were stuck at home early on, Petkus says. It’s too soon to say whether that dramatic but short-lived period will have long-lasting effects—but four years after the virus emerged, some things are still not as they were.
For example, student test scores are recovering but have still not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels; declines have been particularly dramatic in low-income school districts as well as those that had remote learning in place for a long time, says Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and one of the leaders of the Education Recovery Scorecard, a research project focused on pandemic learning loss. The long recovery process probably speaks to a combination of things, Reardon says: not only did kids miss in-person school for a while, they also experienced seismic disruptions in their lives, endured a period of significant stress and anxiety, and are now being asked to learn new material in school while also making up for pandemic-related learning gaps.
“Falling behind on your math skills or your reading skills is not really about a change in your intelligence,” Reardon says. “It’s a change in your skills, how much you’ve had the opportunity to learn.”
It’s hard to say whether the same trends appear among adults, because grownups aren’t taking standardized tests every year at work. Adults were certainly exposed to the same mix of stress, trauma, boredom, and isolation as kids—but Reardon says his hunch is that adults may have an easier time rebounding, since they’ve already developed the skills they lean on to perform complex tasks.
Returning to normal
“There might have been a shock for a couple years, but things are getting back to normal,” Petkus agrees.
Those who feel like their minds melted a little during the pandemic can likely benefit from adopting or resuming the kinds of brain-boosting habits that fell by the wayside during Netflix-fueled lockdowns, like social interaction and mental and physical exercise, Petkus says. Even the effects of stress and trauma can often be counterbalanced with social support and healthy coping strategies, he says. People who recover well from hard events sometimes even experience what’s known as post-traumatic growth, a blossoming of their mental and emotional health after a difficult period.
It’s harder to say whether brain changes that result directly from SARS-CoV-2 infections are reversible, as researchers are still studying that question. But there are some positive signs. Some of the potential causes of chronic brain fog—like persistent inflammation or damage to blood vessels—are theoretically reversible with the right treatments.
Even in Hampshire’s study on post-COVID IQ differences, there was cause for optimism. Hampshire’s team found that people with Long COVID symptoms were, on average, about six IQ points beneath people who’d never had COVID-19. But those whose Long COVID symptoms resolved over time also saw their cognitive scores improve.
That finding is “quite positive,” he said. “There could be some hope for people who are struggling.”
Did the Pandemic Break Our Brains?
Did the pandemic break 🚑️ more Trumpanzee, antivaxxer, 🧠s than any other group? I'd say that the evidence is manifest in the shabby, ill-thought out, logical fallacy ridden posts of our trolls.
Brain memory loss concept
Flavio Coelho—Getty Images
By Jamie Ducharme
September 16, 2024 1:59 PM EDT
https://time.com/7021575/covid-pandemic-19-brain-cognition/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc&utm_campaign=newsletter+brief+default+ac&utm_content=+++20240917+++body&et_rid=207276253&lctg=207276253
Not long ago, Mark Chiverton, a 33-year-old in the U.K., noticed he was making a lot of silly mistakes. He’d mix up words when writing emails, or blank on a basic term while talking to his wife. None of these slip-ups were all that concerning on their own—but they were happening frequently enough that Chiverton worried he was, to put it bluntly, “getting dumber.”
“At first I thought, ‘Maybe it’s just general aging, or maybe I bashed my head and didn’t realize it,’” he says. But eventually, a thought occurred to him: could COVID-19 be the reason for his mental slips? Chiverton thinks he caught the virus in early 2020, before tests were widely available, and he knows for sure he had it in 2022. Though he has no lingering physical effects from those infections (and has periods of time when his brain cramps get better), he sometimes wonders whether those mental slips are mild signs of Long COVID, the name for chronic symptoms following an infection.
He’s not alone in experiencing these problems—and he may not be wrong that COVID-19 is to blame. In the U.S. alone, about a million more working-age adults reported having serious difficulty remembering, concentrating, or making decisions in 2023 compared to before the pandemic, according to a New York Times analysis of Census Bureau data.
Every mental mistake isn't cause for concern, says Andrew Petkus, an associate professor of clinical neurology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. Blunders like forgetting why you walked into a room or spacing out on an appointment can be totally normal parts of being busy, distracted, often under-rested humans. Even though you likely did those things before and brushed them off as nothing, they may seem more significant in the wake of a life-altering event like the pandemic. "If we didn’t have COVID, you might have still forgotten," Petkus says.
Still, it’s not outlandish to think the pandemic has had an effect on our minds, says Jonas Vibell, a cognitive and behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Vibell is currently trying to measure post-COVID inflammation and neuronal damage in the brains of people who report symptoms like brain fog, sluggishness, or reduced energy. When he began publicizing the study, he says, “I got so many emails from lots of people saying the same thing”: that they’d never fully bounced back after the pandemic.
But why? It’s probably a mix of things, Vibell says. The SARS-CoV-2 virus can affect the brain directly, as many studies have now shown. But the pandemic may have also affected cognition in less-obvious ways. Months or years spent at home, living most of life through screens, may have left a lingering mark. Even though society is now mostly back to normal, the trauma of living through a terrifying, unprecedented health crisis can be hard to shake.
Your brain on SARS-CoV-2
It’s clear by now that SARS-CoV-2 is not just a respiratory virus, but also one that can affect organs throughout the body—including the brain. Researchers are still learning about why that is, but leading hypotheses suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may cause persistent inflammation in the brain, damage to blood vessels in the brain, immune dysfunction so extreme it affects the brain, or perhaps a combination of all the above. Studies have even found that people’s brains can shrink after having COVID-19, a change potentially associated with cognitive issues.
COVID-19 has been linked to serious cognitive problems, including dementia and suicidal thinking. And brain fog, a common symptom of Long COVID, can be so profound that people are unable to live the lives and work the jobs they once did. But COVID-19 also seems able to affect the brain in subtler ways. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared the cognitive performance of people who'd fully recovered from COVID-19 with that of a similar group of people who'd never had the virus. The COVID-19 group did worse, equivalent to a deficit of about three IQ points.
That’s not a dramatic difference. Our cognitive abilities naturally fluctuate a little from day to day—and in a July interview with TIME, study co-author Adam Hampshire, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at King’s College London, said a three-point IQ difference is “well within” the range of that normal fluctuation, so small that some people might not even notice it.
But could such a drop be enough to lead to, say, extra typos and absentmindedness? Maybe. In Hampshire’s study, people who’d had COVID-19 consistently performed worse on cognitive tests than people who hadn’t.
If the brain suffers “mild but ubiquitous” changes after an infection, Vibell says, those effects could feasibly “impact the brain, behavior, and social behavior in so many subtle, but maybe [cumulatively] quite bad, ways.”
Beyond the virus
Even for the lucky few who have never been infected, living through a pandemic can impact the brain.
For a recent study in PNAS, researchers conducted pairs of MRI brain scans on a small group of U.S. adolescents: one in 2018 and one in either 2021 or 2022. Over those years, they observed a notable thinning in parts of the kids’ (and especially girls’) brains, including those that control social cognition tasks like processing facial expressions and emotions. Although the researchers did not analyze the effects of SARS-CoV-2 infections, they concluded that the stress of living through pandemic lockdowns was likely to blame for the change, which they likened to an extra four years of brain aging for girls and an extra year for boys.
Stress and trauma have well-documented effects on the brain. Plenty of studies show that people who experience trauma tend to be at greater risk for cognitive decline as they age. Stress can also impair someone’s ability to think clearly, reason, and remember, studies suggest.
“COVID was a generational traumatic event,” says USC’s Petkus. “Everybody was exposed to it.” It’s feasible, then, that the population at large is suffering some of these side effects from trauma and stress.
Even beyond the mental toll of living through a scary and unsettling time, many people had to abandon habits that are good for the brain—things like socializing, staying physically and cognitively active, and seeking out novel experiences—when they were stuck at home early on, Petkus says. It’s too soon to say whether that dramatic but short-lived period will have long-lasting effects—but four years after the virus emerged, some things are still not as they were.
For example, student test scores are recovering but have still not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels; declines have been particularly dramatic in low-income school districts as well as those that had remote learning in place for a long time, says Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and one of the leaders of the Education Recovery Scorecard, a research project focused on pandemic learning loss. The long recovery process probably speaks to a combination of things, Reardon says: not only did kids miss in-person school for a while, they also experienced seismic disruptions in their lives, endured a period of significant stress and anxiety, and are now being asked to learn new material in school while also making up for pandemic-related learning gaps.
“Falling behind on your math skills or your reading skills is not really about a change in your intelligence,” Reardon says. “It’s a change in your skills, how much you’ve had the opportunity to learn.”
It’s hard to say whether the same trends appear among adults, because grownups aren’t taking standardized tests every year at work. Adults were certainly exposed to the same mix of stress, trauma, boredom, and isolation as kids—but Reardon says his hunch is that adults may have an easier time rebounding, since they’ve already developed the skills they lean on to perform complex tasks.
Returning to normal
“There might have been a shock for a couple years, but things are getting back to normal,” Petkus agrees.
Those who feel like their minds melted a little during the pandemic can likely benefit from adopting or resuming the kinds of brain-boosting habits that fell by the wayside during Netflix-fueled lockdowns, like social interaction and mental and physical exercise, Petkus says. Even the effects of stress and trauma can often be counterbalanced with social support and healthy coping strategies, he says. People who recover well from hard events sometimes even experience what’s known as post-traumatic growth, a blossoming of their mental and emotional health after a difficult period.
It’s harder to say whether brain changes that result directly from SARS-CoV-2 infections are reversible, as researchers are still studying that question. But there are some positive signs. Some of the potential causes of chronic brain fog—like persistent inflammation or damage to blood vessels—are theoretically reversible with the right treatments.
Even in Hampshire’s study on post-COVID IQ differences, there was cause for optimism. Hampshire’s team found that people with Long COVID symptoms were, on average, about six IQ points beneath people who’d never had COVID-19. But those whose Long COVID symptoms resolved over time also saw their cognitive scores improve.
That finding is “quite positive,” he said. “There could be some hope for people who are struggling.”
Did the Pandemic Break Our Brains?
Did the pandemic break 🚑️ more Trumpanzee, antivaxxer, 🧠s than any other group? I'd say that the evidence is manifest in the shabby, ill-thought out, logical fallacy ridden posts of our trolls.
Brain memory loss concept
Flavio Coelho—Getty Images
By Jamie Ducharme
September 16, 2024 1:59 PM EDT
https://time.com/7021575/covid-pandemic-19-brain-cognition/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc&utm_campaign=newsletter+brief+default+ac&utm_content=+++20240917+++body&et_rid=207276253&lctg=207276253
Not long ago, Mark Chiverton, a 33-year-old in the U.K., noticed he was making a lot of silly mistakes. He’d mix up words when writing emails, or blank on a basic term while talking to his wife. None of these slip-ups were all that concerning on their own—but they were happening frequently enough that Chiverton worried he was, to put it bluntly, “getting dumber.”
“At first I thought, ‘Maybe it’s just general aging, or maybe I bashed my head and didn’t realize it,’” he says. But eventually, a thought occurred to him: could COVID-19 be the reason for his mental slips? Chiverton thinks he caught the virus in early 2020, before tests were widely available, and he knows for sure he had it in 2022. Though he has no lingering physical effects from those infections (and has periods of time when his brain cramps get better), he sometimes wonders whether those mental slips are mild signs of Long COVID, the name for chronic symptoms following an infection.
He’s not alone in experiencing these problems—and he may not be wrong that COVID-19 is to blame. In the U.S. alone, about a million more working-age adults reported having serious difficulty remembering, concentrating, or making decisions in 2023 compared to before the pandemic, according to a New York Times analysis of Census Bureau data.
Every mental mistake isn't cause for concern, says Andrew Petkus, an associate professor of clinical neurology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. Blunders like forgetting why you walked into a room or spacing out on an appointment can be totally normal parts of being busy, distracted, often under-rested humans. Even though you likely did those things before and brushed them off as nothing, they may seem more significant in the wake of a life-altering event like the pandemic. "If we didn’t have COVID, you might have still forgotten," Petkus says.
Still, it’s not outlandish to think the pandemic has had an effect on our minds, says Jonas Vibell, a cognitive and behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Vibell is currently trying to measure post-COVID inflammation and neuronal damage in the brains of people who report symptoms like brain fog, sluggishness, or reduced energy. When he began publicizing the study, he says, “I got so many emails from lots of people saying the same thing”: that they’d never fully bounced back after the pandemic.
But why? It’s probably a mix of things, Vibell says. The SARS-CoV-2 virus can affect the brain directly, as many studies have now shown. But the pandemic may have also affected cognition in less-obvious ways. Months or years spent at home, living most of life through screens, may have left a lingering mark. Even though society is now mostly back to normal, the trauma of living through a terrifying, unprecedented health crisis can be hard to shake.
Your brain on SARS-CoV-2
It’s clear by now that SARS-CoV-2 is not just a respiratory virus, but also one that can affect organs throughout the body—including the brain. Researchers are still learning about why that is, but leading hypotheses suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may cause persistent inflammation in the brain, damage to blood vessels in the brain, immune dysfunction so extreme it affects the brain, or perhaps a combination of all the above. Studies have even found that people’s brains can shrink after having COVID-19, a change potentially associated with cognitive issues.
COVID-19 has been linked to serious cognitive problems, including dementia and suicidal thinking. And brain fog, a common symptom of Long COVID, can be so profound that people are unable to live the lives and work the jobs they once did. But COVID-19 also seems able to affect the brain in subtler ways. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared the cognitive performance of people who'd fully recovered from COVID-19 with that of a similar group of people who'd never had the virus. The COVID-19 group did worse, equivalent to a deficit of about three IQ points.
That’s not a dramatic difference. Our cognitive abilities naturally fluctuate a little from day to day—and in a July interview with TIME, study co-author Adam Hampshire, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at King’s College London, said a three-point IQ difference is “well within” the range of that normal fluctuation, so small that some people might not even notice it.
But could such a drop be enough to lead to, say, extra typos and absentmindedness? Maybe. In Hampshire’s study, people who’d had COVID-19 consistently performed worse on cognitive tests than people who hadn’t.
If the brain suffers “mild but ubiquitous” changes after an infection, Vibell says, those effects could feasibly “impact the brain, behavior, and social behavior in so many subtle, but maybe [cumulatively] quite bad, ways.”
Beyond the virus
Even for the lucky few who have never been infected, living through a pandemic can impact the brain.
For a recent study in PNAS, researchers conducted pairs of MRI brain scans on a small group of U.S. adolescents: one in 2018 and one in either 2021 or 2022. Over those years, they observed a notable thinning in parts of the kids’ (and especially girls’) brains, including those that control social cognition tasks like processing facial expressions and emotions. Although the researchers did not analyze the effects of SARS-CoV-2 infections, they concluded that the stress of living through pandemic lockdowns was likely to blame for the change, which they likened to an extra four years of brain aging for girls and an extra year for boys.
Stress and trauma have well-documented effects on the brain. Plenty of studies show that people who experience trauma tend to be at greater risk for cognitive decline as they age. Stress can also impair someone’s ability to think clearly, reason, and remember, studies suggest.
“COVID was a generational traumatic event,” says USC’s Petkus. “Everybody was exposed to it.” It’s feasible, then, that the population at large is suffering some of these side effects from trauma and stress.
Even beyond the mental toll of living through a scary and unsettling time, many people had to abandon habits that are good for the brain—things like socializing, staying physically and cognitively active, and seeking out novel experiences—when they were stuck at home early on, Petkus says. It’s too soon to say whether that dramatic but short-lived period will have long-lasting effects—but four years after the virus emerged, some things are still not as they were.
For example, student test scores are recovering but have still not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels; declines have been particularly dramatic in low-income school districts as well as those that had remote learning in place for a long time, says Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and one of the leaders of the Education Recovery Scorecard, a research project focused on pandemic learning loss. The long recovery process probably speaks to a combination of things, Reardon says: not only did kids miss in-person school for a while, they also experienced seismic disruptions in their lives, endured a period of significant stress and anxiety, and are now being asked to learn new material in school while also making up for pandemic-related learning gaps.
“Falling behind on your math skills or your reading skills is not really about a change in your intelligence,” Reardon says. “It’s a change in your skills, how much you’ve had the opportunity to learn.”
It’s hard to say whether the same trends appear among adults, because grownups aren’t taking standardized tests every year at work. Adults were certainly exposed to the same mix of stress, trauma, boredom, and isolation as kids—but Reardon says his hunch is that adults may have an easier time rebounding, since they’ve already developed the skills they lean on to perform complex tasks.
Returning to normal
“There might have been a shock for a couple years, but things are getting back to normal,” Petkus agrees.
Those who feel like their minds melted a little during the pandemic can likely benefit from adopting or resuming the kinds of brain-boosting habits that fell by the wayside during Netflix-fueled lockdowns, like social interaction and mental and physical exercise, Petkus says. Even the effects of stress and trauma can often be counterbalanced with social support and healthy coping strategies, he says. People who recover well from hard events sometimes even experience what’s known as post-traumatic growth, a blossoming of their mental and emotional health after a difficult period.
It’s harder to say whether brain changes that result directly from SARS-CoV-2 infections are reversible, as researchers are still studying that question. But there are some positive signs. Some of the potential causes of chronic brain fog—like persistent inflammation or damage to blood vessels—are theoretically reversible with the right treatments.
Even in Hampshire’s study on post-COVID IQ differences, there was cause for optimism. Hampshire’s team found that people with Long COVID symptoms were, on average, about six IQ points beneath people who’d never had COVID-19. But those whose Long COVID symptoms resolved over time also saw their cognitive scores improve.
That finding is “quite positive,” he said. “There could be some hope for people who are struggling.”
Dear Disturbed White Men,
BigTeezy @TNSouthernlib 22h
Dear Disturbed White Men,
Please stop attempting to harm Donald J Trump with your assault rifles. I really need him to stick around so I can see his reaction to losing to Kamala Harris on November 5th.
Don't take this moment away from me,
Teezy
1. Yes, please stop .
even if Mango Mussolini promised you a pardon , a Bible, a bottle of vodka, some airline tickets, a university scholarship and some steaks. Oh, and some gold sneakers, NFTs and trading cards
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219470889
Same diff.