Struggling to concentrate in lockdown?

An Italian study published in Neurological Sciences reveals the impact of lockdown on people’s memory and cognitive ability, finding that the way we remember and process information is greatly affected when we are in isolation.

Although there is a lack of data on the Australian lockdown experience, the Italian study focused on people who were in lockdown for about two months in 2020, finding that an increase in distractions and mind wandering was common.

The study suggests that our everyday memory gets worse in lockdown because we are living through a type of groundhog day, which makes it harder for our brain to lay down memories and retrieve them later on.

Cognitive psychologist Professor Brett Hayes from UNSW’s School of Psychology said that the study of 4000 respondents found that 30% had experienced some degree of change in their everyday cognition. Some of the common everyday problems related to memory, such as misplacing items, inattention, and losing focus when trying to read a book or watching something online.

“What we know about human memory is that the context is really important. You might be doing a job at home, chatting to a friend, or watching a movie,” Professor Hayes said. “When we have those experiences, we might be focused on the main part of the experience, but our brain is actually encoding a lot of other things just incidentally, like where that’s happening, the location, where and when it’s taking place.”

He explained that our brain is sensitive to this background context, which helps us lay down our memories in a way that allows us to easily retrieve those experiences later on.

“When the context is changing, which it does normally in everyday life when we are moving around and visiting different places in different times of the day, then it’s easy to lay down memories and recall them. But when you are in lockdown, your opportunities to move around in the environment and engage in different activities are very limited. And, when you do get into that groundhog day cycle, just variations on the same thing each day, that’s when the days do tend to start blurring into each other, because we have the same context for each day.”

Professor Hayes explained that this situation makes it harder for our brain to separate those experiences and that’s one of the reasons why we experience memory fog during lockdown.

A study of a two-month lockdown in Scotland last year tasked recipients with online tasks to test their memory, decision-making and selective attention.

They found performance was poorer during lockdown, but once restrictions were eased, particularly the social isolation, they recovered quite quickly. Levels of social interaction during lockdown were also correlated with cognitive performance.

“People who were able to maintain their online interaction more during lockdown did better at these tasks,” Professor Hayes said. “So complete isolation is really very bad for our cognitive functioning, but if we can keep up that level of interaction to some degree with whoever is in our house or online, that seems to be good for our cognitive functioning.”

Due to the close connection between good cognitive ability and physical activity, regular exercise is recommended to try and keep our memory and decision-making in shape. There’s some evidence that even online exercise games can be beneficial.

“The nice thing is that you can play with your family and so there’s a social dimension as well,” Professor Hayes said. “From a memory point of view, if you are able to exercise outside the house, vary those exercise paths from day to day, just to allow a different context for your brain to encode those different days, if you want to be able to remember what you did from day to day a bit better.”

Variations on exercises and activities in your house or apartment will also help you avoid memory fog.

Online yoga and dancing were things that people reported as part of their activity, which seemed to have a beneficial effect on cognition.

“While there hasn’t been time to conduct research on the long-term effects of lockdowns on memory, the evidence so far shows that as restrictions are eased, these cognitive issues should improve,” Professor Hayes concluded.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/wachiwit