#brain changes

Most notably, I'm not grossed out at all by her being gross. Poop, spit up, drool, boogers, etc? Nope. Just something to clean. But if it's a different baby? I still get grossed out.

I'm always able to pick her out of a crowd of babies, and she is the only one my brain recognizes as a real baby, which is HILARIOUS. It's like this baby, not baby state.

My brain is constantly, passively romanticizing having another baby. I don't want another baby, but I do miss when Bug was 3-4 months. For me, that's peak baby. But i don't want another and I'm strong enough to resist the temptation, even if my brain is like AWW CMONNNN

“In the general population, it is normal to see some change in gray matter volume or thickness over time as people age, but the changes were larger than normal in those who had been infected with COVID-19,” Jessica Bernard, a cognitive neuroscientist at Texas A&M who was not involved with the study, wrote in an essay reprinted last month in Scientific American.

Bernard noted that the affected brain regions were “all linked to the olfactory bulb,” which sends signals from the nose to the brain. It also connects to the temporal lobe, home of the hippocampus — which is key to memory and cognition.

She and other scientists declined to draw conclusions from the preliminary study. But Bernard said other research has pointed to a link between a reduced sense of smell and Alzheimer’s disease — making the new study that much more intriguing.

Questions still outnumber answers. Researchers wonder if the damage is from the disease spreading elsewhere in the body or from the virus entering the brain, perhaps through the nose? From neuro-inflammation caused by the infection — or something else? And can it be reversed?

I’ve been reading the excellent The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks, in my continuing search to learn all the things about medical history to provide interesting challenges for Ruth in my next novel. It’s fascinating, as are most of Sacks’ books, but this is probably not his best. He tells multiple stories of people who have various visual losses, of the ability to read, to see with binocular vision,…

Short-Term Memory Language learning is a complex cognitive endeavor that relies heavily on the capacity of the human mind to process, retain, and manipulate linguistic information. At the core of this process lies short-term memory, a cognitive system responsible for the temporary storage and processing of information. However, the inherent limitations of short-term memory pose significant…