I thought I knew what brain fog felt like, but a couple of weeks ago it reached a new level.
I didn’t just forget things like with normal brain fog (if such a thing exists), I didn’t seem to have any attention span whatsoever.
I know most people are familiar with this sense of getting to a room and forgetting why you went there.
But imagine you think of something you wanted or needed to do, and you know you’ll forget so you better start immediately or write it down at least, but the two seconds it takes you to get up or grab something to make a note is enough for you to forget you even got up with the intention of doing anything.
Any time I did manage to write a reminder, I’d still not get anything done cause I would completely forget to check for reminders, and any time I came across one I was taken by surprise because I no longer had any memory of writing it down.
The craziest thing was that I’d forget what I was doing *even whilst doing it*.
I really, really thought that the act of doing something would be enough of a cue to sustain my attention on the activity, but no. Apparently I’d run out of “attention capacity” halfway through doing something and then just get up and go do something different because I forgot that I was in the middle of doing something.
It has gotten a bit better again, I can still be absentminded but at least I remember the concept of to-do lists and wanting to get things done again now. It really feels quite spooky to think back to how ridiculous the brain fog got, and I still keep finding notes of things I wrote down during that period and have no memory of having done that.
I would love to know what was going on in my brain during that period.
I keep thinking about those studies that show that there are cells in the brain that are active throughout the period of time in between having received a cue that signalled that a particular action needed to be taken, and then the moment of the actual action. One can experimentally manipulate the latency between the “choice” – the moment one presumably decides that one wants to take action X – and the moment where one then gets to execute X. In other words, one can experimentally vary the amount of time one has to wait before being able to perform action X. There are these cells that stay activated throughout this whole wait period between choice and moment of execution, and on those occasions where these cells don’t stay active, action X does not get executed even when the possibility arises.
I keep wondering if for some reason my brain failed to create this type of sustained activity that allows you to remember what you wanted to do.
I can’t wait for the day we can non-invasively measure single-neuron activity in human brains…
… and the day we figure out why migraine states create such funky symptoms.