#...yeah pretty much

This is the fog of late pandemic, and it is brutal. In the spring, we joked about the Before Times, but they were still within reach, easily accessible in our shorter-term memories. In the summer and fall, with restrictions loosening and temperatures rising, we were able to replicate some of what life used to be like, at least in an adulterated form: outdoor drinks, a day at the beach. But now, in the cold, dark, featureless middle of our pandemic winter, we can neither remember what life was like before nor imagine what it’ll be like after.

To some degree, this is a natural adaptation. The sunniest optimist would point out that all this forgetting is evidence of the resilience of our species. Humans forget a great deal of what happens to us, and we tend to do it pretty quickly—after the first 24 hours or so. “Our brains are very good at learning different things and forgetting the things that are not a priority,” Tina Franklin, a neuroscientist at Georgia Tech, told me. As the pandemic has taught us new habits and made old ones obsolete, our brains have essentially put actions like taking the bus and going to restaurants in deep storage, and placed social distancing and coughing into our elbows near the front of the closet. When our habits change back, presumably so will our recall.

That’s the good news. The pandemic is still too young to have yielded rigorous, peer-reviewed studies about its effects on cognitive function. But the brain scientists I spoke with told me they can extrapolate based on earlier work about trauma, boredom, stress, and inactivity, all of which do a host of very bad things to a mammal’s brain.

“We’re all walking around with some mild cognitive impairment,” said Mike Yassa, a neuroscientist at UC Irvine. “Based on everything we know about the brain, two of the things that are really good for it are physical activity and novelty. A thing that’s very bad for it is chronic and perpetual stress.” Living through a pandemic—even for those who are doing so in relative comfort—“is exposing people to microdoses of unpredictable stress all the time,” said Franklin, whose research has shown that stress changes the brain regions that control executive function, learning, and memory.

That stress doesn’t necessarily feel like a panic attack or a bender or a sleepless night, though of course it can. Sometimes it feels like nothing at all. “It’s like a heaviness, like you’re waking up to more of the same, and it’s never going to change,” George told me, when I asked what her pandemic anxiety felt like. “Like wading through something thicker than water. Maybe a tar pit.” She misses the sound of voices.

Prolonged boredom is, somewhat paradoxically, hugely stressful, Franklin said. Our brains hate it. “What’s very clear in the literature is that environmental enrichment—being outside of your home, bumping into people, commuting, all of these changes that we are collectively being deprived of—is very associated with synaptic plasticity,” the brain’s inherent ability to generate new connections and learn new things, she said. In the 1960s, the neuroscientist Marian Diamond conducted a series of experiments on rats in an attempt to understand how environment affects cognitive function. Time after time, the rats raised in “enriched” cages—ones with toys and playmates—performed better at mazes.

I get the feeling M!Morgan would be about as excited as F!Morgan with the prospect of having another him to strategize with.  You don’t get that kind of opportunity every day, right?  Gotta take advantage!  Unlike F!Morgan who takes the “incessant asking” route, though, I like the idea of M!Morgan trying to “prove” himself worthy of his Fallen self’s time by trying to catch him in traps (and spoiling at least a few of them by getting too excited when the other M!Morgan seems to be getting close to falling for it and revealing where he’s lying in wait).  At some point he would have to succeed -- either by actually keeping quiet or by distracting his Fallen self enough to lower his guard and catch him in a pitfall -- and at that point beg for a tactical meeting. 

Heck, they might even have a similar revelation over their identical tomes that the F!Morgans had, but with Fallen M!Morgan getting upset and scrambling to ensure the book is okay while the other comments on how familiar it looks before pulling out his own and talking about it.  Given how important that book seems to his Fallen self, he would probably apologize and say that he doesn’t have to talk strategy with him, especially after he almost ruined something so important...and for the first time, maybe Fallen M!Morgan actually says that he will join him sometime -- because he finally sees the connection they share, and recognizes some value in it.