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investigate what’s actually happened to our
brains and personalities since March 2020.
The early signs aren’t great.
In a survey conducted by the University
of Westminster, 80 per cent of participants
said their memory had deteriorated since
the pandemic began. The most common
problem was forgetting when an event or
incident happened, which 55 per cent
highlighted as an issue. A report by the
University of Exeter and King’s College
London found that people aged 50 and over
who were more anxious and depressed
during the first year of the pandemic had an
average decline in their short-term memory
equivalent to six years of natural ageing.
Many people with older relatives have
witnessed this palpable decline first hand.
“Our lives being reduced to predictable
patterns without variety can have a dramatic
effect on how we perceive time,” explains
Dr Daisy Fancourt, an associate professor
of psychobiology and epidemiology at
University College London. “If we don’t
have holidays, parties, weddings, that can
have a very strange effect, not unlike the
sensory deprivation that happens in prison,
space and submarines. That craving for
novelty is biologically inbuilt.”
Physicists and theologians have often
debated the nature of time. Is it linear?
Circular? Linear and circular? During the
pandemic, however, time has resembled
something more akin to a pretzel, looping
back and forth in a tangled mess. Days and
months often lack the kinds of notable
experiences that fire up our hippocampus,
acting as clothes pegs for our brains and
allowing us to hang memories upon them
like well-worn jackets.
“Our experience of time is not this
continuous record of what’s happening, it’s
really based on our experience of discrete
episodes and events,” says Duke Han,
a professor of psychology at the University
of Southern California. “Someone’s
birthday, or just leaving the house and
going to work — we use these experiences
to help us understand the passage of time.”
Even when not in lockdown, our lives
have narrowed. The range of people we see
is less varied. Peripheral friends have drifted
away. Parties, those explosions of sensory
and social data, are a rare treat. Work from
home environments inevitably contain far
less variety. “The cues we use to understand
the passage of time aren’t all there any
more,” Han says. “That’s how we encode
memories, so it’s no surprise a number of
us might feel this sense of being muted.”M
y memories of 2021 generally
feature long periods of apathy and
lassitude, interspersed with sudden
spikes of freedom and movement.
The year began of course with
the grim, sedentary days of January and
February, gawping morbidly as case and
death rates soared like a 1980s bull market,dreaded Delta variant then washed up here
in May, ripping through Bolton and the
north and then everywhere else.
Despite it all, summer brought a burst of
near-normality, as things began to stabilise
and the contentious “freedom day” arrived.
For me this meant a soggy but fortifying
staycation in Cornwall, a rare sunshine-
fuelled debauch on Bournemouth beach
and even a rather exotic jaunt to Corfu.
I watched Andy Murray stir his creaking
limbs in front of a packed Centre Court
for a doomed run at Wimbledon. We had
the madness of the Euros, beer-soaked
hugs and Harry and Raheem and an air of
cathartic danger as football flirted briefly
with coming home and Wembley was
overrun by bored thugs. I even wentwondering if there was anything left worth
watching on the telly and waiting for a
vaccine that seemed agonisingly out of
reach. Many of us hit a winter wall.
By late March medicine, volunteerism
and — dare I say it — a dash of Blitz spirit
heralded a better day. Yet even when it
arrived, the serenity of vaccination was fairly
short-lived. By April, apocalyptic images of
mass cremations on the Ganges filled our
screens. With depressing inevitably, theFrom top: a crowded cremation ground near
Delhi in April; Boris Johnson joins an online
class at a school in east London in FebruaryDURING THE PANDEMIC TIME
HAS RESEMBLED SOMETHING
MORE AKIN TO A PRETZEL,
LOOPING BACK AND FORTH IN
A TANGLED MESS
The Sunday Times Magazine • 49