Has the pandemic affected our memories?
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sunday Times special correspondent Josh Glancy explores how the pandemic and successive lockdowns have left us in a brain fog struggling with the concept of time.
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Host: Manveen Rana.
Guest: Josh Glancy, Sunday Times special correspondent.
Clips: The Guardian, The New Yorker
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When I look back over the last two years, to be honest, it's a bit of a blur. |
| 0:13.6 | It's mostly lockdown, punctuated by the news, and even that's muddled. |
| 0:18.9 | Watching the reviews of 2021, it felt like half of the stories from last year had actually |
| 0:24.4 | happened a lifetime ago, and lots of people seem to say that, which made us wonder how |
| 0:31.6 | has living in and out of lockdown changed our ability to remember and our sense of the |
| 0:38.9 | passing of time. |
| 0:39.9 | There's a sort of debate between physicists and theologians and others about the nature |
| 0:44.4 | of time. |
| 0:45.4 | Is it linear? |
| 0:46.4 | Is it circular? |
| 0:47.4 | Is it some combination of the two and I thought it sort of felt a bit more like a pretzel |
| 0:52.5 | really, it sort of keeps looping back on itself? |
| 0:56.3 | How has this period of relative isolation affected us? |
| 1:01.8 | And what impact might it have in the future? |
| 1:04.8 | In a special essay, the Sunday Times correspondent Josh Glancy spoke to experts about the impact |
| 1:10.7 | on our mental health, our collective memory, and how this period might be affecting children's |
| 1:17.4 | development. |
| 1:18.9 | Children born in the pandemic are showing, at least initially, that they have on average |
| 1:22.6 | a lower IQ because they're getting less exposure to all the things that help a child interpret |
| 1:28.8 | the world. |
| 1:29.8 | You're listening to stories of our times from the Times and the Sunday Times. |
| 1:34.2 | I'm Manvian Rana. |
... |
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