Study results show that coronavirus shutdowns had the same impact on people’s memory as prison sentences

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

Researchers in the UK asked 227 people to name the year in which major news events such as Meghan Markle joining the British royal family or the launch of the first Covid vaccines took place.

However, they found that the volunteers remembered events from 2021 about as badly as they did four years earlier.

The scientists said this is similar to how people in prison lose the ability to tell time due to a lack of “reference events” such as birthday parties and holidays.

In the study, which involved 227 people in the UK, they were asked to name the year when major news events took place

dr Arash Sahraie, a psychologist at the University of Aberdeen and senior author of the study, said: “Research shows that in prison days fly and years fly by, with inmates losing track of time.”

“This is similar to what we’ve seen with people who were asked to recall events during lockdown, probably because like prisoners, they didn’t have life events like birthday parties and holidays that they could use as reference points to track the passage of time.”

The study, published in the journal PLOS One, found that between 2017 and 2021, people experienced four events every five years.

These included Meghan Markle joining the royal family, completing Brexit, starting the Covid vaccination program and banning Donald Trump from Facebook.

For each event, the volunteers had to choose the year they thought it was taking place, namely between 2016 and 2022.

The more recent the news, the better they should have remembered it – so the volunteers surveyed last May are likely to have done best for 2021, which was just the previous year.

But they were more than a year behind – an average of 1.15 years – on their estimates of the dates of 2021 events like the first tourist flight into space and the container ship Evergreen becoming stuck in the Suez Canal.

The poor accuracy for 2021 was comparable to the problems people had remembering events much further back, in 2017 and 2018, where their answers were wrong by 1.21 and 1.13 years, respectively .

People’s memories of 2020 weren’t as bad as researchers believe because the pandemic lockdowns didn’t start until late March and because the shock of the situation gave people time “milestones” to keep track of as the months went by.

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

People had worse memories when dealing with more anxiety and depression during lockdowns, agreeing with statements in a questionnaire such as “During the pandemic, I had nothing to look forward to”.

dr Sahraie said: “People remember what happened during the pandemic – they just don’t remember when.”