How to think clearly

Clarity in Thinking

By learning to question and clarify your thoughts, you’ll improve your self-knowledge and become a better communicator

by Tom Chatfield

 

 

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Need to know

Sometimes, when I’m grappling with a tricky topic, I pretend that I need to explain it to a child. For example, here is my attempt at explaining the purpose of this Guide to a notional nine-year-old:

I want to help people work out what they really think and mean, and then to share the results with other people. This is surprisingly hard. It’s easy to talk about what you want and like. But it can be really difficult to work out why you want or like particular things – and why other people should pay attention. I’m going to set out a three-part process that can help with this.

As the parent of two young children, I often get to skip the pretending part of this exercise. But I’d recommend giving it a try, no matter what your domestic situation. It can be both challenging and powerful to talk someone else through an idea, step by step, in terms that take as little as possible for granted. Often, it’s only when I try to explain something in this way that I discover that I don’t fully understand it myself.

As it happens, there’s a subreddit devoted to precisely this principle. It’s called ‘Explain Like I’m Five’, and features tens of thousands of attempts at explaining complex ideas as simply as possible. Question: how can archaeologists translate ancient scriptures or languages? Answer: ‘It’s basically a giant jigsaw puzzle.’ Q: how do conferencing programmes such as Zoom handle so many different screens? A: ‘Everyone has one connection to Zoom’s central servers.’ Q: if carbs are sugar, why can’t we just eat sugar? A: ‘It would be a bit like replacing the firewood in your fire pit with a tub of gasoline …’ And so on.

I enjoy browsing ‘Explain Like I’m Five’ partly because it isn’t interested in perfection. Instead, it’s packed with comments, debates and works-in-progress; with points and counterpoints, gags and squibs. Much like the business of explaining something to an actual five-year-old, it’s full of distractions and dead ends. But it’s also relentlessly committed to dispelling errors and unexamined assumptions; and in privileging honest questions and confessions of uncertainty over any performance of expertise.

All of this emphasises a fundamental point about clarifying your thinking. It asks you to admit your thoughts are unclear to begin with – and thus, that certain elements within them need to be rethought, or placed upon more secure foundations. It’s as if you’re shedding layers of preconception, misconception and false consciousness. And the ultimate prize isn’t being right, gratifying though this might be. It’s being understood.

Why should anyone care about any of this? Without wishing to be grandiose, I’d argue that seeking clarity is both humane and life-enhancing. To idealise, it entails the mutual and respectful pursuit of knowledge. To be more pragmatic, it can help us know ourselves a little better, dispel prejudices and misapprehensions – and communicate more richly and persuasively amid the 21st century’s tumult.

Aspiring towards clarity is also inexorably iterative. Whenever you set out to clarify your thinking, you’re not aiming to articulate an ultimate truth. Rather, you’re aiming at a process, the result of which will always be an act of communication, complete with all the imperfections and contingencies this implies.

In this Guide, I want to help you think about what this process looks like for you. As promised, I’ll do this in three stages (preceded by a pause). The first stage entails reflecting on why you believe something to be true or important. The second entails teasing out the assumptions this reasoning relies upon. The third entails acknowledging what you do and don’t know, where you’re uncertain­ – and what it might mean to redress these things.

Think it through

Before you begin…

To start with, let’s take a moment. Draw a breath. Slow yourself down. What’s going on? What are you thinking and feeling? What most deserves your attention? There’s a great line in Robert Poynton’s book Do Pause (2019) that speaks to the significance of taking stock in this way:

In a pause you can question existing ways of acting, have new ideas or simply appreciate the life you are living. Without ever stopping to observe yourself, how can you explore what else you might do or who you might become?

Inviting people to pause is among the easiest advice in the world to give, and the hardest to take. Yet it’s foundational to clarifying your thinking, because this is where it all begins: with a moment of self-reflection. Without pauses, there can be no second thoughts and no self-interrogations. There is no process until you take the time to embark upon it.

You might think that this point is too obvious to be worth making. Yet, in my experience, it’s where most of us fall down. We all carry around countless unclear, confused, contradictory thoughts and feelings. And precisely because we have neither the time nor the tools to sort them out, they mostly stay this way.

Once you’ve paused, a common psychotherapeutic exercise can help you take a first step towards clearer thinking. It’s about observing yourself as neutrally as possible. You make yourself comfortable, relax, then try to notice the flow of your thoughts and feelings in a nonjudgmental way: the flickers of anxiety, anticipation, regret; the memories and ideas bubbling into consciousness.

These are the raw materials that any process of clarification must work with. The more carefully you’re able to attend to them, the more likely you are to tease out their complexities and contradictions. And the less likely you are to mistakenly assume that whatever seems obvious to you will necessarily seem obvious, or compelling, to someone else.

What are you claiming, and why?

When I perform the above exercise, I notice one thing that’s on my mind is a nagging question around what I eat. Should I become a vegetarian, or a vegan, for ethical and environmental reasons? And if not, why not?

In philosophy, what’s known as standard form is often used to set out the essentials of a line of thought as clearly as possible. Expressing your thinking in standard form means writing out a numbered list of statements followed by a conclusion. If you’ve done it properly, the numbered statements should present a line of reasoning that justifies your final conclusion. For example, here’s a first attempt at organising my thoughts around diet:

1. Both eating meat and using animal products are associated with vast amounts of unnecessary animal suffering.
2. They also use more energy and resources than most plant-based alternatives.
3. It’s perfectly possible to have a healthy diet and live a full life without eating meat or using most animal products.
4. So far as possible, I should try to prevent unnecessary animal suffering, excessive energy usage and the overconsumption of resources.

If I believe all of the above to be true, I should thus adopt a vegetarian or a vegan diet.

You might have seen examples of this approach before, or used it in your own work. You might also have encountered a great deal of discussion around logical forms, reasonable and unreasonable justifications, and so on. What I find most useful about standard form, however, is not so much its promise of logical rigour as its insistence that I break down my thinking into individual steps, and then ask two questions of each one:

• Why should a reasonable person accept this particular claim?
• What follows from this claim, once it’s been accepted?

When it comes to clarifying my thoughts and feelings, the power of such an approach is that anything relevant can potentially be integrated into its accounting – but only if I’m able to make this relevance explicit. Here’s how a few further thoughts might fit into my example:

1. Both eating meat and using animal products are associated with vast amounts of unnecessary animal suffering.
2. They also use more energy and resources than most plant-based alternatives.
3. It’s perfectly possible to have a healthy diet and live a full life without eating meat or using most animal products.
4. So far as possible, I should try to prevent unnecessary animal suffering, excessive energy usage and the overconsumption of resources.
5. If I believe all of the above to be true, I should thus adopt a vegetarian or a vegan diet.
6. However, I’m not currently a vegetarian or a vegan.
7. This suggests that either: I don’t believe the above reasons to be true, or to be the whole story; or that I do, yet somehow still don’t find them compelling.

If I want to clarify my thinking around this issue, I need to investigate the divide between my apparent beliefs and my actions.

How might you apply such an approach yourself? As you’ll have noticed, the thoughts I’ve just added bring further complexities and qualifications into focus. They take what was once a relatively straightforward conclusion and turn it into something more complex – and revealing.

Paradoxically enough, this is a vital component of clarifying your thinking: stripping away oversimplifications, no matter how compelling or appealing, and replacing them with an honest acknowledgment of circumstances. The logic of my initial argument might have seemed admirably clear; but this clarity doesn’t correspond as closely as I might wish to reality.

Honest self-examination and iteration are vital, here. Even now, reading back my own words, I’m not sure I’ve managed to describe my state of mind accurately – or the issues at stake. Is it really true that there’s no ethical way of eating meat or of using animal products? Are there shades of meaning I’ve neglected in an effort to establish clear categories of right and wrong? Or am I simply failing to act on my beliefs because of a combination of inertia and self-indulgence?

These are just a few of the questions my scenario begs. And behind them is a fundamental point: that it’s only by repeatedly questioning both the why and the what of our claims, and the claims they in turn rely on, that we can hope to strip away the layers of habit, confusion and self-justification that all too often typify everyday thoughts.

What have you taken for granted?

Upon what basis can I justify any claims? Some will rely on external evidence; some on personal preferences and experiences; some on a combination of these factors. But all of them will at some point invoke certain assumptions that I’m prepared to accept as fundamental. And it’s in unearthing and analysing these assumptions that the most important clarifications await.

Assumptions are those things we take for granted: whatever we don’t explicitly spell out, but that our thinking relies upon. Assumptions are also extremely important. Indeed, it’s the existence of shared assumptions that makes communication (and much else) possible. As I write these words, I’m assuming they mean approximately the same thing to you as they do to me. It would be incredibly tiresome if I tried to explain every word in a sentence. It would also, in the end, be futile. I’d still have to explain my words via other words, my ideas via other ideas, and so on. Without some shared assumptions, there would be no way of building either common understandings or meaningful disagreements.

While common understanding and meaningful disagreement might sound like opposites, they’re actually two sides of the same coin. No matter how self-evident they might seem to us, the assumptions that our ideas rest upon might need spelling out to others. Some people could, for example, view animal suffering as a non-issue, on the grounds that human experience is all that counts when it comes to ethics. Some could believe that no further justification of veganism is required beyond the self-evident evil of inflicting unnecessary suffering on our fellow creatures. And some (among whom I tentatively count myself) might believe that most forms of industrial farming and fishing are abhorrent, but that there are some circumstances under which animal products can be ethically and sustainably sourced.

Our assumptions, in other words, aren’t just unexamined ideas. They’re also the roots of identity and allegiance; the stuff of our personal and shared histories; of our communities and our morality. They are the sources of much of the greatest good and deepest harm we do to one another. That which we take as ‘given’ is nothing less than the bedrock of what we believe the world to be.

What follow from this? When it comes to clarifying your thinking, it means that you need to be very clear about the difference between what follows from your assumptions and the status of those assumptions. To take things step by step:

• Any line of thought must begin with certain assumptions: those things that you both explicitly and implicitly accept as given. No matter how deep you dig, you’ll never be able to find a wholly clear, self-evident and uncontroversial claim.
• A careful process of analysis can show where your assumptions lead: what reasonably follows from them, if you assume that they’re true or accurate.
• But different lines of reasoning based on different sets of assumptions are likely to take you in very different directions.
• One of the most useful things you can thus do is to spell out both your own and other people’s key assumptions, then to compare what follows from each.
• If you’re sufficiently open-minded, this can help you identify assumptions you hold in common with others, challenge faulty ones on both sides, and respectfully engage with alternative perspectives from your own.

Working out the implications of your assumptions is, in other words, far from the same thing as being definitively correct; and grasping the difference between these lies at the heart of honestly and persuasively articulating your views.

Embrace dialogue – and know your limits

What do you make of my attempts to clarify my thinking about meat-eating, thus far? Hopefully, even if you disagree with every single word I’ve written, you’re more likely to understand where I’m coming from than if I just blurted out: ‘I think that maybe I ought to stop eating meat.’ I certainly feel more confident about what’s going on in my head. And this suggests that, if we ever end up discussing these things in person, we’re more likely to be able to debate our differences constructively. We’ll perhaps be able to work out where we do and don’t disagree – and why – rather than falling back upon blanket assertions or aspersions. In the end, we might even arrive at a new, clearer understanding together.

This, I’d suggest, is the most precious thing about clearly presenting the thinking behind any point of view: not that it proves your rightness or righteousness, but that it volunteers your willingness to participate in a reasoned exchange of ideas. At least in principle, it suggests that you’re prepared to:

• Justify your position via evidence and reasoned analysis.
• Listen to, and learn from, perspectives other than your own.
• Accept that, in the face of sufficiently compelling arguments or evidence, it might be reasonable to change your mind.

This approach is underpinned by what’s known as the principle of charity: a phrase that can sound strange in the context of disagreements, but that embodies one of our oldest and most practical guides to constructive debate. It exists in various formulations, all rooted in the same idea:

So far as possible, you should try to extract the maximum truthful and reasonable content from what others say, especially if they disagree with you.

Importantly, the principle of charity extends not only to what someone is saying, but also to your assumptions around why they are saying it:

Unless you have decisive evidence to the contrary, you should start off by assuming that someone else’s position is reasonable and sincerely held, rather than that they’re malicious, ignorant or mistaken.

Why? In both cases, the answer isn’t because this is a nice thing to do, but because it’s only by beginning with charitable assumptions that you can get to grips with the underpinnings of someone else’s perspective – and ensure that any judgment you eventually pass is based on a careful, fair-minded assessment.

All of which brings us back to the most important point of all: that clarifying your thinking means being as honest as possible about what you don’t know, and then putting a frank engagement with these limitations at the heart of your account.

Indeed, perhaps the most important tool in any attempt at clear thinking is the capacity to test (and to keep on testing and refining) your ideas as if they belonged to someone else: as acts of reasoned persuasion that must stand, or fall, on their own terms.

Key points

• Clarifying your thinking is a process: one that’s necessarily incremental, iterative and imperfect. There’s no such thing as a perfectly clear statement.
• Clarification comes from setting out your thinking, step by step, in as straightforward and explicit a manner as possible – and then stepping back, revisiting the result, and seeking to redress its limitations.
• First of all: pause. It’s only by slowing down and attending carefully to your own thoughts that you can hope to embark upon a process of clarification.
• What’s on your mind? Once you’ve worked out what deserves your attention, try to spell out why you believe it to be true or important. This entails reconstructing your reasoning systematically. Set it out in numbered sequence, being sure to ask of each claim: why should a reasonable person accept this; and what does (and doesn’t) follow once it’s been accepted.
• Don’t be seduced by oversimplifications or too tidy a formulation of complex issues. It’s important to be as clear as possible about the tensions, ambivalences and ambiguities you’re grappling with. Addressing complex ideas lucidly isn’t the same as pretending they’re simple.
• Be explicit about the relevant assumptions your reasoning relies on. These will invariably include some claims you believe to be fundamental. Be aware that two perfectly reasonable lines of argument based upon different fundamental assumptions could lead to very different conclusions.
• Engage charitably and rigorously with perspectives other than your own, and don’t assume dishonesty or bad faith in others without good reason.
• To idealise, a constructive exchange of views is one in which you first ensure you’ve stated someone else’s position in a manner they agree is fair – and only set about addressing your differences once you’ve done this.

Why it matters

What does it mean to make the kind of process I’ve outlined above habitual – and what might it mean, for you, to apply it effectively in different areas of your life?

This is the point at which your personal preferences come into play. For me, the props and routines of clear thinking include (in no particular order) strong cups of coffee, directionless neighbourhood strolls, a desk surrounded by heaped books and scrap paper, and as much serendipitous reading as I can squeeze in between school runs.

For you, the twin realms of the possible and the desirable might look very different. But the same principle applies. We both need to take a close interest in the times, places, habits and contexts that bring out the best in us – and that give us permission to contemplate, then try to explain, what’s really going on when it comes to the questions that matter most.

Another way of putting this is that willpower is overrated. Among all the potted insights I’ve drawn from social science, this is perhaps the handiest and most humbling. Unless you seek out contexts, routines and environments that support your best self, you’ll struggle to be that self at any but the very best of times.

Aim to interrogate and audit your habits in the light of this insight. Find ways of thinking and working that work for you. Be as ruthless as possible about identifying the ones that don’t work, and why; and how far you can minimise the toll they take. Try to take a lively and systematic interest in your own blind spots and limitations. Be honest about what you do and don’t know, where you’re uncertain; and what kind of conversations, investigations, predictions and discoveries might reduce this uncertainty.

Above all, don’t forget to ask for help when you need it – and to offer it whenever you can. When it comes to clarity and communication alike, this is perhaps the simplest and most important thing any of us can do: keep talking to one another, and try to truly listen to what’s being said in response.

Links & books

The Critical Thinking course from the University of Auckland is available, for free, online, and covers everything from evidence and reasoning to law and morality.

The Philosophy Bites podcast offers an extensive archive of bite-sized interviews with world-leading thinkers, and is hard to beat for insights into big ideas.

Mary Midgley’s book What Is Philosophy For? (2018) accessibly explores what it means to think clearly about the questions that matter most.

Oliver Burkeman’s weekly column ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’ ran in The Guardian from 2006 until 2020, and is a wise, witty treasure trove full of practical, humane advice about thinking and working well – and cutting yourself some slack along the way.

My own book How to Think (July 2021) addresses clear thinking in the context of everyday experience, with an emphasis on habits and practical skills.

Brain fog: how trauma, uncertainty and isolation have affected our minds and memory

Our minds and memory 

 

After a year of lockdown, many of us are finding it hard to think clearly, or remember what happened when. Neuroscientists and behavioural experts explain why

Moya Sarner

Wed 14 Apr 2021 06.00 BST

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unslash

Before the pandemic, psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s patients might come into his consulting room, lie down on the couch and talk about the traffic or the weather, or the rude person on the tube. Now they appear on his computer screen and tell him about brain fog. They talk with urgency of feeling unable to concentrate in meetings, to read, to follow intricately plotted television programmes. “There’s this sense of debilitation, of losing ordinary facility with everyday life; a forgetfulness and a kind of deskilling,” says Cohen, author of the self-help book How to Live. What to Do. Although restrictions are now easing across the UK, with greater freedom to circulate and socialise, he says lockdown for many of us has been “a contraction of life, and an almost parallel contraction of mental capacity”.

This dulled, useless state of mind – epitomised by the act of going into a room and then forgetting why we are there – is so boring, so lifeless. But researchers believe it is far more interesting than it feels: even that this common experience can be explained by cutting-edge neuroscience theories, and that studying it could further scientific understanding of the brain and how it changes. I ask Jon Simons, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, could it really be something “sciencey”? “Yes, it’s definitely something sciencey – and it’s helpful to understand that this feeling isn’t unusual or weird,” he says. “There isn’t something wrong with us. It’s a completely normal reaction to this quite traumatic experience we’ve collectively had over the last 12 months or so.”

What we call brain fog, Catherine Loveday, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Westminster, calls poor “cognitive function”. That covers “everything from our memory, our attention and our ability to problem-solve to our capacity to be creative. Essentially, it’s thinking.” And recently, she’s heard a lot of complaints about it: “Because I’m a memory scientist, so many people are telling me their memory is really poor, and reporting this cognitive fog,” she says. She knows of only two studies exploring the phenomenon as it relates to lockdown (as opposed to what some people report as a symptom of Covid-19, or long Covid): one from Italy, in which participants subjectively reported these sorts of problems with attention, time perception and organisation; another in Scotland which objectively measured participants’ cognitive function across a range of tasks at particular times during the first lockdown and into the summer. Results showed that people performed worse when lockdown started, but improved as restrictions loosened, with those who continued shielding improving more slowly than those who went out more.

It’s likely that in a year or two, we’ll look back on some event this year and say, when on earth did that happen?

Loveday and Simons are not surprised. Given the isolation and stasis we have had to endure until very recently, these complaints are exactly what they expected – and they provide the opportunity to test their theories as to why such brain fog might come about. There is no one explanation, no single source, Simons says: “There are bound to be a lot of different factors that are coming together, interacting with each other, to cause these memory impairments, attentional deficits and other processing difficulties.”

One powerful factor could be the fact that everything is so samey. Loveday explains that the brain is stimulated by the new, the different, and this is known as the orienting response: “From the minute we’re born – in fact, from before we’re born – when there is a new stimulus, a baby will turn its head towards it. And if as adults we are watching a boring lecture and someone walks into the room, it will stir our brain back into action.”

Most of us are likely to feel that nobody new has walked into our room for quite some time, which might help to explain this sluggish feeling neurologically: “We have effectively evolved to stop paying attention when nothing changes, but to pay particular attention when things do change,” she says. Loveday suggests that if we can attend a work meeting by phone while walking in a park, we might find we are more awake and better able to concentrate, thanks to the changing scenery and the exercise; she is recording some lectures as podcasts, rather than videos, so students can walk while listening. She also suggests spending time in different rooms at home – or if you only have one room, try “changing what the room looks like. I’m not saying redecorate – but you could change the pictures on the walls or move things around for variety, even in the smallest space.”

Brain fog has resulted partly from ‘degraded social interaction’. Illustration: Franz Lang/The Guardian

The blending of one day into the next with no commute, no change of scene, no change of cast, could also have an important impact on the way the brain processes memories, Simons explains. Experiences under lockdown lack “distinctiveness” – a crucial factor in “pattern separation”. This process, which takes place in the hippocampus, at the centre of the brain, allows individual memories to be successfully encoded, ensuring there are few overlapping features, so we can distinguish one memory from another and retrieve them efficiently. The fuggy, confused sensation that many of us will recognise, of not being able to remember whether something happened last week or last month, may well be with us for a while, Simons says: “Our memories are going to be so difficult to differentiate. It’s highly likely that in a year or two, we’re still going to look back on some particular event from this last year and say, when on earth did that happen?”

Perhaps one of the most important features of this period for brain fog has been what Loveday calls the “degraded social interaction” we have endured. “It’s not the same as natural social interaction that we would have,” she says. “Our brains wake up in the presence of other people – being with others is stimulating.” We each have our own optimum level of stimulation – some might feel better able to function in lockdown with less socialising; others are left feeling dozy, deadened. Loveday is investigating the science of how levels of social interaction, among other factors, have affected memory function in lockdown. She also wonders if our alternative to face-to-face communication – platforms such as Zoom – could have an impact on concentration and attention. She theorises – and is conducting a study to explore this – that the lower audio-visual quality could “create a bigger cognitive load for the brain, which has to fill in the gaps, so you have to concentrate much harder.” If this is more cognitively demanding, as she thinks, we could be left feeling foggier, with “less brain space available to actually listen to what people are saying and process it, or to concentrate on anything else.”

It is the cognitive equivalent of feeling emotionally distressed – it’s almost the way the brain expresses sadness

Carmine Pariante, professor of biological psychiatry at King’s College London, is also intrigued by brain fog. “It’s a common experience, but it’s very complex,” he says. “I think it is the cognitive equivalent of feeling emotionally distressed; it’s almost the way the brain expresses sadness, beyond the emotion.” He takes a psycho-neuro-immuno-endocrinological approach to the phenomenon – which is even more fascinating than it is difficult to say. He believes we need to think about the mind, the brain, the immune and the hormonal systems to understand the various mental and physical processes that might underlie this lockdown haze, which he sees as a consequence of stress.

We might all agree that the uncertainty of the last year has been quite stressful – more so for some than for others. When our mind appraises a situation as stressful, Pariante explains, our brain immediately transmits the message to our immune and endocrine systems. These systems respond in exactly the same way they did in early humans two million years ago on the African savannah, when stress did not relate to home schooling, but to fear of being eaten by a large animal. The heart beats faster so we can run away, inflammation is initiated by the immune system to protect against bacterial infection in case we are bitten, the hormone cortisol is released to focus our attention on the predator in front of us and nothing else. Studies have demonstrated that a dose of cortisol will lower a person’s attention, concentration and memory for their immediate environment. Pariante explains: “This fog that people feel is just one manifestation of this mechanism. We’ve lost the function of these mechanisms, but they are still there.” Useful for fighting a lion – not for remembering where we put our glasses.

When I have experienced brain fog, I have seen it as a distraction, a kind of laziness, and tried to push through, to force myself to concentrate. But listening to Loveday, Simons and Pariante, I’m starting to think about it differently; perhaps brain fog is a signal we should listen to. “Absolutely, I think it’s exactly that,” says Pariante. “It’s our body and our brain telling us that we’re pushing it too much at the moment. It’s definitely a signal – an alarm bell.” When we hear this alarm, he says, we should stop and ask ourselves, “Why is my brain fog worse today than yesterday?” – and take as much time off as we can, rather than pushing ourselves harder and risking further emotional suffering, and even burnout.

People are finding themselves more sluggish – their physical and mental weight is somehow heavier, hard to carry around

For Cohen, the phenomenon of brain fog is an experience of one of the most disturbing aspects of the unconscious. He talks of Freud’s theory of drives – the idea that we have one force inside us that propels us towards life; another that pulls us towards death. The life drive, Cohen explains, impels us to create, make connections with others, seek “the expansion of life”. The death drive, by contrast, urges “a kind of contraction. It’s a move away from life and into a kind of stasis or entropy”. Lockdown – which, paradoxically, has done so much to preserve life – is like the death drive made lifestyle. With brain fog, he says, we are seeing “an atrophy of liveliness. People are finding themselves to be more sluggish, that their physical and mental weight is somehow heavier, it’s hard to carry around – to drag.” Freud has a word for this: trägheit – translated as a “sluggishness”, but which Cohen says literally translates as “draggyness”. We could understand brain fog as an encounter with our death drive – with the part of us which, in Cohen’s words, is “going in the opposite direction of awareness and sparkiness, and in the direction of inanimacy and shutting down”.

This brings to mind another psychoanalyst: Wilfred Bion. He theorised that we have – at some moments – a will to know something about ourselves and our lives, even when that knowledge is profoundly painful. This, he called being in “K”. But there is also a powerful will not to know, a wish to defend against this awareness so that we can continue to live cosseted by lies; this is to be in “–K” (spoken as “minus K”). I wonder if the pandemic has been a reality some of us feel is too horrific to bear. The uncertainty, the deaths, the trauma, the precarity; perhaps we have unconsciously chosen to live in the misty, murky brain fog of –K rather than to face, to suffer, the true pain and horror of our situation. Perhaps we are having problems with our thinking because the truth of the experience, for many of us, is simply unthinkable.

I ask Simons if, after the pandemic, he thinks the structure of our brains will look different on a brain scan: “Probably not,” he says. For some of us, brain fog will be a temporary state, and will clear as we begin to live more varied lives. But, he says, “It’s possible for some people – and we are particularly concerned about older adults – that where there is natural neurological decline, it will be accelerated.”

Simons and a team of colleagues are running a study to investigate the impact of lockdown on memory in people aged over 65 – participants from a memory study that took place shortly before the pandemic, who have now agreed to sit the same tests a year on, and answer questions about life in the interim. One aim of this study is to test the hypothesis of cognitive reserve – the idea that having a rich and varied social life, filled with intellectual stimulation, challenging, novel experiences and fulfilling relationships, might help to keep the brain stimulated and protect against age-related cognitive decline. Simons’ advice to us all is to get out into the world, to have as rich and varied experiences and interactions as we can, to maximise our cognitive reserve within the remaining restrictions. The more we do, the more the brain fog should clear, he says: “We all experience grief, times in our lives where we feel like we can’t function at all,” he says. “These things are mercifully temporary, and we do recover.”

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