Hillel Hinton-Williams

To say the past year and a half has been a major change in lifestyle, is at this point, a very tired sentiment. The fact is that Americans have faced huge and persistent changes to their lives because of the pandemic, a. And the effects of that change will be long lasting. And though the full effects of this experience may never be fully known, one element I’d like to speak on is that of our memory. That is, how the pandemic,and its auxiliary effects, affected our memory of the pandemic. Our memory for this time has been changed drastically by the pandemic, and in particular, by the implementation of the quarantine. The imposition of needing to remain in our homes, secluded from others; and especially the repetitiveness, as well as, the effects of being quarantined has had on people will result in a major reduction of our memory from this time. Most pronounced in our episodic memory, or lack thereof, and having a less extreme effect on our semantic memory. 

On March 13^th COVID-19 was named a pandemic and national emergency and soon after the quarantine began. Young people were pulled out of schools and forced to stay home, college students were largely sent home, some workers were robbed of their jobs and made to stay in their homes, and those who managed to remain gainfully employed began working from home if possible. All of us began avoiding public spaces, albeit to different extents, and finding new ways to spend our time. This first month or two is very likely to be very vivid in people’s memory. Brown (2021) suggests that this period, the initial transition into quarantine, will be better remembered. I attribute this vividness to the extreme novelty of the situation and the importance that this period would hold for the future circumstance people would find themselves in. It does make a kind of intuitive sense as well as psychological that the beginning of a long term change in circumstance would be remembered especially well. But I digress, novel experiences as well as experiences which provide necessary information for surviving in a new context are remembered far more readily than ‘typical’ or ‘repetitive’ experiences. These experiences are remembered in more detail and integrated more persistently as future events bring these first moments to mind often. These memories during the transitional period also remain stable over time.

However, after that initial bump I believe that there’ll be a major dip in the recalled episodic memories for the next long period of lockdown. That period was approximately from the beginning of summer 2020 to summer 2021 when vaccines were being distributed and businesses and states had largely reopened, before the wave we are currently riding. Despite the very turbulent times that this period encompassed, much of people’s lives consisted of doing the same things in the same places, with little variation in their lived experiences. This repetition caused the creation of a schema which organized and encoded most of people’s experiences as semantic knowledge rather than providing a framework for a more equal distribution of semantic and episodic. Many people during this time felt that the lockdown consisted of one long moment, “with its rapid spread, corona paradoxically leaves the world in both a paralysed and frenzied ‘now’, with little time for future-thinking or attention paid to those outside the narrow emergency-frames of collective (usually national) identity” (Erll 2020). With this instantaneous feeling, and our corresponding schema which organizes all of the moments indiscriminately, we are therefore left with an inability to coherently phrase our episodic memories across time. And we remember far less from the lockdown period because of it. 

However, this perpetual feeling of instant happening and accompanying schema is not the only reason I believe a large part of people’s day to day lockdown experiences will be largely remembered. I also believe that an effect of the lockdown, the imposed social isolation, will have a degrading effect on people’s memories of this time. Research into the connection between social isolation and memory reveals, “that perceived isolation and quality of social contacts play an important role in cognitive functioning… especially poor memory” (Read 2019). This connection between memory and social stimulation has and continues to be well researched, and it has reached a general consensus in the field that the presence, or lack thereof, of social stimulation has a negative effect on memory. One explanation may be that as social creatures we need to have input from outside observers and actors in order to properly interpret and regulate our emotional and mental health. Operating under that understanding then with the lack of social interaction and imposed isolation, it is easy to predict that our memory for this time will be greatly reduced. Another explanation differs in suggesting that rather than being needed solely for maintenance of mental functioning, social interaction is simply a base upon which memories are more easily drawn and encoded; because of its continued relevance. Under this proposition we would describe our experiences as either happening within a social context or outside of it. And our memories would then be recorded and encoded with a priority being placed on those that had a social aspect. With the long stretch of very little social interaction this lockdown has imposed on us, that priority towards social experiences would simply have it that we don’t remember much of our lockdown experiences because it lacks that social element. With either of these explanations it is clear to me that one way or another, either by an inability to remember or a lack of motivation, the social isolation caused by the lockdown will cause people to remember less of the pandemic period.

In conclusion, I believe that the lockdown during quarantine, as well as its auxiliary effects, namely the extremely repetitive nature of pandemic life, and the social isolation, will have a negative impact on people’s memory of the pandemic. While I believe that memory of the period as a whole will worsen, it is important to note that I believe the transitional period leading into the lockdown will be remembered more clearly than pre-pandemic because of its extremely novel and relevancy to how our lives would continue. The repetitiveness of the lockdown contributed to the creation of a ‘forever moment’ which organized our memories into a schema which didn’t attend to episodic memories and focused almost exclusively on semantic knowledge. In addition to the reduction of the creation of episodic memories, the social isolation inherent to locking down also negatively impacted people’s memories. We need interaction with others to keep our minds healthy and operating well and an abundance of research has connected the absence of that interaction and a worsening in people’s memories. I believe that these two things, the repetition and social isolation, have and will continue to interact and thereby worsen people’s memories of this period.