Covid shutdowns had same effect on people’s memories as serving jail time, study finds

Lockdowns during the pandemic may have had a similar impact on people’s memories as serving prison sentences, a study suggests.

Researchers in the UK asked 227 people to name the year in which major news events occurred, such as Meghan Markle’s entry into the British royal family or the rollout of the first Covid vaccines.

But they found that the volunteers remembered events from 2021 about as poorly as those from four years earlier.

The scientists said this was similar to what happens to people in prison, who lose the ability to keep track of time because of the absence of “reference events” such as birthday parties and holidays.

Dr. Arash Sahraie, a psychologist at the University of Aberdeen and lead author of the study, said: ‘Research shows that people in prison drag on for days and years fly by, with inmates losing track of time.

“This is similar to what we saw in people who were asked to recall events during lockdowns, probably because, like prisoners, they didn’t have life events like birthday parties and holidays to use as reference points to track how time passed.”

The study, published in the journal PLOS Onegave people four events for each of the five years, between 2017 and 2021.

These include Meghan Markle joining the royal family, Brexit being finalized, the Covid vaccination program starting and Donald Trump being banned from Facebook.

For each event, the volunteers had to pick the year they thought happened, between 2016 and 2022.

The more recent the news report, the better they should have remembered it – so the volunteers, who were polled last May, should have done their best for 2021, which was only the previous year.

But they were more than a year — 1.15 years on average — behind the dates of events in 2021, such as the first tourist flight into space and the Evergreen container ship running aground in the Suez Canal.

The poor accuracy for 2021 was similar to people’s problems remembering events that happened much longer ago, in 2017 and 2018, for which their answers were wrong by 1.21 and 1.13 years, respectively.

People’s memories weren’t so bad for 2020, which researchers say is because the pandemic lockdowns didn’t start until late March, and because the shock of the situation gave people time to “landmark” how the months went by.

The study states: ‘Although drawing a comparison between the prison environment and pandemic-related restrictions can be seen as an extreme case, we argue that there are similarities in the degree of social isolation in both situations.’

People had worse memories if they struggled with more anxiety and depression during the lockdowns and agreed with statements in a questionnaire such as ‘during the pandemic I had nothing to look forward to’.

Dr. Sahraie said: “People remember events that happened during the pandemic – they just don’t remember when.”